Improve rural schools

SOME teachers work under trying conditions in remote areas where there is a total lack of transport. Some are far from home, living in areas without ablution and sanitation systems.

Yet they persevere, saying teaching is their calling – preparing our children and moulding the future, helping bring to fruition the dream of a black child: to become that engineer, that doctor, that agricultural or physical scientist, that lawyer.

At times it seems parents and their own department push for legislation that will result in contempt from the pupils the teachers are educating, by abolishing the right to chastise illdisciplined children.

I once acted as a teacher in 1997 at Ludeke Junior Secondary School near Ntabankulu.

It was for a short time, but indeed the taste of a pudding is in the eating.

I commend the Department of Education for providing vehicles to some schools but I wish it could do so to all schools. Everything possible must be done to hurry up and abolish all mud schools. For most teachers not even a rural allowance will tempt them to go teach in remote areas, and I understand this. It takes a teacher with real calling to do so.

The national government must cooperate with the provincial department to make rural teaching conditions more attractive, and support teachers so as to produce good results and put our country right at the top as far as education is concerned.

Keep up the good work, our teachers. — Xola Mkuyana, Bhisho