April 2, 2006

AN educational system that truly honours the universal right to education must value its most direct agents: teachers. But the profession is in crisis in many countries, said experts taking part in the recently-held World Education Forum in this industrial suburb of Rio de Janeiro.

Gustavo Fischman, assistant professor of education at Arizona State University, painted a realistic picture of the conditions faced by educators, whose profession is surrounded by a special mystique, but whose work is increasingly undervalued and underpaid.

The Argentine-born academic told IPS that of every 10 people who earn a degree in education in the United States, only four are actually teaching five years after graduating.

Seven out of 10 university professors in the US have no job stability and are hired on a contract basis, which means many of them work simultaneously at several institutions. Fischman described these faculty members as “taxi” professors, who spend more time commuting from one institution to another than in the classroom. Of these professors, he added, four out of 10 are foreign-born.

In Latin America, meanwhile, the buying power of the salaries of teachers and professors has shrunk enormously over the past 25 years. The middle class, which has traditionally seen teaching as an attractive profession, has been less and less drawn to it due to the low salaries, said Fischman.

“It’s true that the teaching profession today is seen progressively more as a route for social ascent by people from other socioeconomic levels because the requirements are less stringent. It is easier to earn a teaching degree than a sociology degree, for example,” he said.

But that means that teachers increasingly lack the necessary training and skills for such an important mission. And worse yet, they do not have the financial conditions or the incentives needed to continue their training and keep up-to-date.

Fischman said spending on education has shrunk worldwide, and one of the results of that is larger class sizes, which has had negative consequences for everyone involved.

First of all, it affects “primary school children between the ages of four and 10. It would be important for them to be able to attend class with a total of 12 students. That would make it possible to compensate for any other problem, and the learning process would be much more effective,” he said.

Secondly, it affects teachers as well. “Teachers, especially in secondary school, frequently have 200 to 250 different students a week. That implies a huge amount of work to correct, which makes it impossible for teachers to dedicate themselves to ongoing training and professional development, which is essential for them to continue doing their job well.”

“In my opinion, practically all of the governments in Latin America, and indeed the world at large, have covered the teaching profession with a mantle of ‘vocation’: teachers are seen as the state’s ‘missionaries’, whose job it is to give love. But instead of this the thinking should be ‘it’s wonderful that they love their students, but they need to be well-versed in math, geography and chemistry, and they need to be able to write and do research’,” said Fischman.

“Today we have professors who don’t write, and who don’t take the time to read. That is alarming. How can it be that someone who is supposed to teach a passion for reading doesn’t read? In any profession, we want the professionals to be nice, but the most important thing is that they are good at what they do, and that they keep up their training continuously, whether we’re talking about a mechanic, a dentist or a professor,” he said.

“If you go to the dentist after reading that there is a new, less painful treatment for cavities, wouldn’t you want your dentist to be familiar with it? So, if you’re talking about the different ways of learning to read and write, wouldn’t you want teachers to be familiar with them? Of course you would,” said Fischman.

Finland has the best educational system in the world, according to standardized testing, Fischman pointed out. Cuba also has one of the best, he argued. But he said that “because Cuba has aspects that are difficult to apply in other countries, we’ll focus on the situation in” Finland.

The northern European country has the best-paid teachers, not in absolute terms, but in relation to purchasing power, he noted. In addition, the teaching profession is highly respected there, and university entrance exams for earning a teaching degree are as challenging as for any other degree.

For instance, prospective engineering students are not required to know more math than prospective teaching students. The effort required and the difficulty level are the same, he said.

“In second place, the working conditions in the schools are appropriate,” he added. “Average class size is between 20 and 22. And teachers work as a team to evaluate students and to address problems.”

What can countries like Argentina and Brazil or Pakistan do to achieve conditions similar to those seen in Finland and Cuba? In Fischman’s view, there are many things that can be done, such as investing more in training teachers and equipping schools properly, in order to bolster and facilitate the work of teachers.

“I am not going to say that all teachers are free of individual responsibility. But school systems must be structured in such a way that such problems do not arise,” he said.

Fischman’s views on education were supported by the representative of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), Pierre Fonkoua, during a conference on “the state and society in the construction of public policies”.

In his short presentation, Fonkoua complained about the crisis of authority in education, and said the training of teachers must be recognized as essential in every society.

The Fourth World Education Forum ended with a declaration that urged all countries to earmark six per cent of their GDPs to education. Some 30,000 teachers, students and activists from 25 countries took part in the conference that began on March 23 and concluded on March 26.

The first edition of the World Education Forum was held in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Allegre in 2002, as part of the World Social Forum, the annual global civil society gathering.

—Dawn/IPS Service

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