Teaching: The dignity of a profession

In some countries of the world, teaching is one of the most riled professions that easily come to mind. In Cameroon, teaching comes only second to the police force as the most abused and abusive occupations.

If someone wants to insult another, they could use the police as an anecdote. In years past, for a young girl to marry a teacher meant she was condemning herself to a perpetual life of misery. Teachers were seen as a miserly set of individuals who could not even master their own destiny.

However, today a teacher sees himself as the bedrock of the society. He knows that every individual in the society has received at least some instruction or tutelage from a teacher and teachers would like to use this view to project themselves more.

They would like society to graduate from previously held perception of the teaching profession and see the teacher more as deserving to be treated with greater dignity. When a teacher is greeted by his past student, or observes them performing and achieving greatly in different fields and capacities of life, they would like society to take note that “that is my product”.

However one would like to ask what the teacher is doing to earn and sustain this dignity. Who gives dignity to the teacher and the teaching profession? Although the teaching profession is regarded as the lowest of its kind, sometimes teachers themselves, by their attitudes lend credence to this perception.

They are always seeking better pay and in most cases their claims are right because the salary that they receive (especially in the private sector) is abusive. The denominational schools in this country have earned the reputation of exploiting teachers, going by what their teachers earn. However the dignity of the profession is not always about how much those who incarnate it earn, but more by what values and standards they stand for.

Teachers must also learn the habit of standing up for values, for values form the core of the knowledge they impart on the young people entrusted to them. A teacher would not make a student stand up tomorrow for values when he himself does not believe in or defend those values.

Teaching is the backbone of education and in any country; education is a key sector, attracting the highest budgetary allocation in any economy. Most countries in the world (especially in developing countries) invest mostly in education and therefore this requires that teachers understand what they represent in the society. This is what makes their profession dignified. Teachers are educationists and therefore, they need to be part of any education system.

About 20 years ago, the teachers in Cameroon stood up like one man to protect an education system that was gradually being destroyed by the Government, and got the examination board formed. That board has not only lent credibility to education but also to teachers and the teaching profession. This therefore underscores the need for teachers to belong to teachers’ unions where the nobility and dignity of their profession is jointly defended.

In this country, the teaching profession is looked low upon because of the reputation it has developed for itself over the years. Teachers are generally seen as people who don’t have a calling to be teachers, especially considering that some of them bribe their way into the training colleges.

This perception does not lend credibility to the profession at all. Such teachers are likely to be the ones who give bribes to become principals or give bribes to be transferred to schools of their choice, or refuse to teach children during the allotted teaching periods but organise extra classes so as to extort money from children, or trade marks for sex, etc.

These are the elements that have made the teaching profession to develop such low repute and therefore it is only the teacher who can revive the profession. This can be achieved when the teacher is seen again, standing up for ideals which go beyond personal self-aggrandisement.

Teachers of the erstwhile Southern Cameroon need to know that the Anglo-Saxon educational system in this country is still under threat of annihilation and it is only they, as the bedrock of the education system, who can salvage it.

There seems to be a surreptitious but deliberate attempt by the regime to nudge the Anglophone teacher out of existence because the Francophone is using their demographic majority to replace them in all the schools and institutions.

Their education and even their assessment systems are in the control of Francophones who were not brought up in that system and who are using their domination of power and money, to stifle them and then wipe them out. The teacher has to fight these evils.

Our children are being taught by Francophone teachers who get trained in HTTC Bambili but who neither master the subject nor the language of instruction; all this with the blessing of the regime. It is the educationists who must stand up against this onslaught. If the teachers stand up resolutely against such ills that affect the educational system in which he was trained, the profession will begin to gain some elements of nobility and respect.

The examination board which the teachers fought for is now taken over by a regime which is bent on polluting the education system which the board is meant to defend. But the teachers look on with disinterest. This is not likely to make the profession respected.

But if the teachers understood that the regime, buy not paying the out of station dues to examiners on time, is only trying to bring them into beggarliness and the board which they fought for into disrepute, they should join their teachers union to protest against this bondage.

This would help change the perception of the teaching profession. People would reckon that the teachers are not fighting for money for their individual pockets, but for the smooth functioning of a system.

The Francophone regime of Cameroon should not be allowed to bring only negative interference into a noble profession and the system it represents. If the teachers want it to remain noble they should fight all the ills brought into it by individual teachers and by the regime of this country.

University lecturers are not exempted from this phenomenon. They are mostly seen as an unscrupulous and immoral group because they pass or fail students depending in their social relationships with them.

In the erstwhile university of Yaounde, students who did not buy the lecturers hand out notes could never hope to pass the course taught by the lecturer; while their female friends were sure to pass their courses as long as they accepted to have sex with lecturers.

We learn that this kind of malpractice is continuing at the University of Buea. This is a university which was created to function as an Anglo-Saxon institution but which has deviated so very far from this ideal that the quality of its lecturers and administrators should be questioned.

How can people who have graduated from reputed foreign Anglo-Saxon universities like Enugu, Fourrah Bay, Sheffield, Cambridge, etc, allow another similar university decay in their own hands like this?

In the Buea University, children who have spent fourteen years of primary and secondary school education with English as the language of instruction are denied admission into the university, while Francophone students who come in with no language background, are given six weeks of intensive English and are preferred for admission.

It is a total aberration that in a university which claims Anglo-Saxon culture, Deans, and Vice Chancellors are appointed by decree. The case of the Buea University is particular because, the Francophone population is about to outnumber that of Anglophones.

And this is being perpetrated deliberately by the regime in place because it wants to completely annihilate the Anglo-Saxon culture and the people who incarnate it – the erstwhile Southern Cameroon.

These hybrid Cameroonians (Francophone by birth and origin but Anglophones by education) are being groomed by the regime and being prepared to conquer the Southern Cameroon territory in all its aspects. And the teachers of Southern Cameroon origin just look on passively.

Universities like Sheffield, Cambridge, etc. serve as nurseries for leaders of tomorrow. They boast of very strong student unions in which students are groomed in democracy which then translates into good governance. But in the Buea University, while the student union has been stifled and turned into an appendage of the administrators, the lecturers themselves spend their time fighting each other for positions of appointment as deans and heads of department using even crooked means to get there.

All these do not bode well for teaching in particular and education as a whole. Teachers and lecturers must do what is necessary so as to merit what is rightfully theirs – DIGNITY.