Negative Effects Of The Rat Race

We know how the rat race constantly demands our attention, but we aren’t paying attention to what it has done and still doing to our children; who we are half-heartedly calling our future. We know that teaching is not just a calling, but also a profession. And like any profession, training is mandatory. If you don’t train them, you don’t blame them. If you think training is expensive, try ignorance. And that’s why we have been ignorantly parading our sub-standard schools and graduating our ignorant children.

Everywhere you go today, you hear stories of how our primary school pupils wrote and read letters for their illiterate parents, uncles, aunts and neighbours. And these pupils were all products of our public and mission schools. How did they do it? They did it because they were the products of trained teachers. Teachers who had graduated, from the various teachers’ training colleges, and they even produced their individual teaching aids. And there was specialization too. Our teachers taught academics, physical education, home economics, first aid and morality.

We had all the inter-school and intra-school competitions, from sports to academics. Our teachers were proud to be teachers. They were housed and paid as when due. There was accountability in the education ministry when we had round pegs in round holes. Our graduates were respected both at home and abroad.

We lost it, when we started putting square pegs in round holes in the ministry and education boards; due to our greed and gullibility. We then took over the mission schools, gradually scrapped housing for teachers and delayed their salary payments. We killed our teachers’ training colleges. We stole our money to set up our private schools, continued to starve our public schools and we started graduating students who can’t compete in the job market; while we continue to heartlessly and shamelessly steal our money to send our children to the best schools abroad, without a care for our masses.