As I waited to pick my child up from the private school where he studies, I ran into a former well-known local academic, also waiting for his son, and engaged him in conversation.
He asked why someone like me who writes regularly about the faults and disadvantages of private education would send his child to a private school.
I threw the same question back at him, asking why someone who had spent more than 30 years as a teacher and administrator in public schools would send his child to a private school. Surely he could have selected the best public school and sent his children there.
Knowing he couldn’t use a few big words and flashy ideas to justify his position, he said bluntly that he had become dissatisfied with the public schools and so had withdrawn his son from them.
He said he was convinced that public school teachers viewed students as a source of income and that the teachers were more interested in pursuing their private interests than in giving anything useful to their students.
Teachers who have spent long years in the profession flock to big cities after losing all enthusiasm and the desire to initiate and inspire while young teachers, armed with the latest educational techniques, are sent to remote areas. Some teachers spend hours checking stock market trends and commodity prices; others take turns in running a real estate office that is open round the clock. Some absent themselves from the school morning assembly because for them, the national songs and slogans sung by the pupils focus on domestic concerns at the expense of greater national issues.
Others justify their absence by saying they have to check on the foreign workers under the sponsorship of their wives under whose name a business license has been issued.
My point about public schools is that they lack a mechanism which would enable everyone to express an opinion freely. There is not even a minimum level of coordination and integration with students’ families and so schools are run like personal property by the teaching staff.
Worst of all, the very system set up by the school is not followed with the result that students find themselves detached from their surroundings and the outside world.
I conclude by asking the following: How many of those teachers have, over the past month, read a single scientific article related to teaching techniques and how many have read even one book in the past year?
