The position of teachers in our education system 1

I have been wrestling with the ‘teacher’ question for over fifteen years. Unfortunately the debate on teachers and their centrality to the public education system is highly polarised. There is a large community of administrators, researchers and writers who have taken to regular ‘teacher- bashing’ and there are an equally vocal community that takes a contrary view. The purpose of this short article is to try and understand the way teachers are positioned in our system and why and how this is an important cause for concern.Approximately 42 per cent of government elementary schools have only one or two teachers for the elementary grades. However, the teachers are not equipped to effectively conduct multi- grade teaching despite clear policy directives at the national level. The NCF 2005 suggests considerable planning is required on the part of teachers to address multi-grade situations — however, the teacher education process still treats multi-grade situation as an anomaly