Think positively as educators

I REFER to the report “Teachers, keys to quality in education” ( StarEducate, Nov 25).

The writer highlighted how the government has engineered the education system in Finland and the model adopted by the Finnish where specialist teachers hold masters’ degrees in the disciplines they are teaching. Finland is a developed country where teachers are truly professionals. Becoming a teacher is highly competitive where they require a master’s degree to teach.

The situation is quite different in Malaysia, even though we have a large pool of dedicated teachers, as the Global Education Survey Report 2018 by Cambridge Assessment points out.

I wish to share my thoughts on several issues, which have direct relevance to the above topic.

1. Getting teacher specialists with a masters degree may be a challenge for schools in the short term. For teachers teaching the English Language, our present teachers could take the CELTA (Certificate of English Language to Speakers of Other Languages) programme run by British Councils throughout the world. This is a world class qualification. This can be the benchmark for our dedicated teachers.

Our teachers could be sent in batches to do this programme and a training of trainers could be initiated. There are similar programmes for other major subjects as well.

We could think of setting up a pool of these trained teachers and the cream of which could become master teachers across the country.

2. The curriculum for Values Education should be revisited. The Education Ministry has taken the right step in abolishing exams for students in the early years of their education. This is the ripe time to teach and inculcate respect, discipline, punctuality, trust, tolerance and empathy in our young minds.

I had the opportunity to study in Japan some years back and it’s really difficult to come across a Japanese who is disrespectful, be it to foreigners, office colleagues or their own family members. Their punctuality and discipline is second to none in the world! These values are built-in and embedded in the students’ hearts and minds in their early years of education.

Let’s think positively as we educators hold the key to a more progressive and developed Malaysia, both academically and morally. Let us work with the young minds and the results will follow. Rome was not built in a day!