Make Teaching Attractive

01-08-10
Page 17

THE President of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Mr Joseph Kwaku Adjei, has underscored the need for the country to make the teaching profession attractive at all levels of the educational system to make it appealing to brilliant students.
“Young people should no longer choose the teaching profession as the least favoured alternative because they fail to find employment in another sector. Being a teacher must be a choice borne out of a passionate desire, motivation and commitment,” he said.
Mr Adjei said this at the opening of the third quadrennial and 50th national delegates conference of the GNAT in Accra .
The conference which was attended by about 750 delegates is on the theme: “Investing in People to achieve Quality Education by 2015”.
He said teaching should be made sufficiently attractive to retain educators, adding that “it is sad to state that the teaching profession continues to be devalued over the years and successive governments continue to pay lip-service to improvements that are needed to bring it to a better pedestal”.
“Posterity will judge us if we should allow the education sector to be blighted in this way,” he emphasised.
According to him, the second Millennium Development Goal (MDG) set by the United Nations (UN) that all children should receive primary education by 2015 was simultaneously the world’s most important goal since education was critical to the survival of the next generation.
Mr Adjei said education was undoubtedly the driving force to the achievement of the rest of the MDGs.
“It is on record that today there are approximately 70 million children globally who were not in school. In Ghana, over 800,000 children are out of school; 70 per cent of these are rural dwellers,” he stated.
Mr Adjei cited reasons for the high number of out- of school children to include the neglect of rural basic education by successive governments, in comparison with urban basic education.
He described the incident as unfortunate since the bulk of the country’s foreign exchange was derived from gold, cocoa and non-traditional exports which were found and produced in the rural areas.
On the issue of better conditions of service for public sector workers, he said, the situation where the government responded to the plight of such workers only when they threatened industrial action should be a thing of the past since it did not augur well for good and healthy industrial relations.
Mr Adjei, therefore, urged employers to respond promptly to the “needs of employees to enhance industrial harmony at all times”.
He appealed to the President to make the Bawku conflict a top priority and inculcate into the traditional rulers and the citizenry, the spirit of dialogue to resolve conflicts since there could be no peace in the country with a section of the population under siege.
The President, Prof. John Evans Atta Mills, who opened the conference, gave the assurance that the government was this year feverishly working towards reversing the unfortunate trend of inadequate remuneration received by public sector workers, especially teachers.
“The near implementation of the Single Spine Salary Structure is a clear manifestation that the government is committed to improving the lot of teachers here on earth,” he said.