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We have been fooled for far too long into believing that “teaching is a calling” and schooling is education.
I regard teaching as a profession just like other professions, schooling as a system that keeps things the same and education as a liberating tool used to look into the world with the intention to overcome our challenges.
Since I started practising as a teacher, I have been fighting a serious battle to unlearn what I have learnt so that I learn in the process.
Let us stop misleading teachers by making them think they are divine and spiritual individuals who are called into this profession.
As teachers, we have to be professionally qualified – like doctors or lawyers or accountants – and we must be compensated the same way other professionals are.
Sometimes it’s a lack of critical thinking that deprives generations of teachers who will decolonise their thinking.
We were brainwashed to believe that teachers should go the extra mile for nothing because teaching is a calling.
We were bombarded with the false notion that teaching is a noble profession or a profession for noble people.
But what is noble about us if we remain poor?
Of course we must go the extra mile and be the agents of change, but we also need proper remuneration. That thing of saying a teacher does not work overtime is hogwash.
Unions, which are supposed to be the vanguards of the education workers, are fighting for their significance in mainstream politics.
They are used as tools to neutralise the teachers by telling them that teaching is a calling and a noble kind of profession, when they themselves (our union leaders) enjoy the existing orders.
They stay in suburbs and leave the majority of the teachers they represent in the townships and rural villages behind.
They are no longer fighting for our demands, but for their recognition in the political world so that they can be politically uplifted.
To place the word ‘calling’ in perspective, we need to undress it.
It has some divine clothing. It is connected to divinity since it is derived from the Christian school of thought, which has some elements of colonialism.
It is also attached to the orthodox definition of teaching. This word further suggests that good teachers are born and not made.
It is this assertion that is wrong because teachers are made through constant development.
George Knight puts his colonial influenced view thus: “The role of a teacher is ministerial and pastoral in the sense that the teacher is leading young people into a saving relationship with Jesus. Teachers are pastors within the school.”
This further portrays teaching as a divine profession.
I have successfully learnt to love teaching and have developed passion for it without failure. I have learnt to spend my spare time with my school kids not because it is my calling, but because it is my profession.
We need appropriate support because, in this profession, we are not divinely appointed. It’s detrimental not to give teachers proper support and then expect divine intervention to deliver the curriculum – that is wrong.
This leaves many young people thinking that, if they find it hard to deliver the curriculum in class during the first months in their jobs, teaching is not their calling and they end up quitting or shifting to other professions.
Research has established that 40% of teachers leave their profession within five years of practice as a result of large class sizes, disciplinary problems, administrative paperwork (that has nothing to do with teaching) and the meagre salary that comes after hard work.
As a result, the majority of those who remain become very stressed, frustrated and less productive. Teachers give more and get little because of the “teaching is a calling” syndrome.
This phrase has been abused and misused to deprive teachers of adequate compensation for their work for far too long.
If teaching is a noble profession, let there be compensation to reflect its nobility.
It is clear that teachers are exploited with the help of our unions, which should stop sleeping in the same bed with the employer.
That was good when we were fighting the same enemy – the apartheid monster – but it’s unacceptable now.
Teachers must take heed of the fact that one of the most powerful myths is that teaching is a calling that made teachers play a part in their own exploitation.
Let’s begin to decolonise ourselves to start changing this detrimental mind-set and replace it with the understanding that teaching must be a rewarding profession.
Teachers must learn patriotism because, when people are patriotic enough, they will always do what they ought to do with love, energy and enthusiasm.
We need to start learning to unlearn that teaching is a calling as teachers end up being the authors of their own suffering.
The ridiculous offer tabled by our employer for the “public servants” is going to further enslave teachers.
Remember that the word ‘servant’ refers to someone who works for a master, which puts us in the same category as slaves.
Shishenge is an indigenous language teacher and language activist
