“A THIRD” of all Secondary School Teachers have severe Psychological Problems

It is high time we immediately prioritize how we are going to spend the 400% increase in our Education Budget allocation for 2016 before Politicians decide to pocket it for personal gain. I quote from the link below. 

The allocation for the Ministry of Education will see a four-fold increase from the previous year, going up to more than Rs. 185.9 billion from the Rs. 47.6 billion allocated in the 2015 Budget.

http://www.sundaytimes.lk/151011/news/defence-allocation-rises-education-up-four-fold-presidents-budget-slashed-167583.html

Firstly let me say that the Journalists of Sri Lanka need to have their heads examined by reporting that the Budget for Education next year is up by 400%. There is NO WAY this country can even begin to spend four times what was spent last year, unless the education minister decided to pocket it! Education at most cannot absorb any more than a 25% increase, without excess money going to waste on unneeded or ill thought out projects.

So they would have been better advised to ask for an explanation from the Govt. before making such a misleading statement, which the Education Minister will use for personal aggrandizement.

SO LET US SAY THAT THE GOVT. WILL SPEND MORE ON EDUCATION

How should we prioritize to spend this extra money?

The detail is too long for this blog entry and I will highlight it somewhere else. HOWEVER RIGHT UP TOP MUST BE – Steps taken to evaluate the psychological competence of our 250,000 teachers for the job they have been entrusted with. This along with improving the quality of the existing teachers must be right up there as the most important, and can be done in the guise of improving the quality, so that the ire of the powerful Teacher Unions will not be raised!

I know the Teachers UNIONS which represent the teachers will be up in arms about this, but they are only thinking of its membership, some of whom are patently unfit to teach, so we must convince the Country at large that this is done for the benefit of the Students – WHO REPRESENT the future of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s students leave school on the whole completely uneducated, and no one has told them that!

Just having three A at A levels is not being educated, as most of those with 3 A’s are unable to find productive work even 5 years after getting those fancy grades, whilst it is hard pressed to find any who dropped out of school before O levels, still unemployed even three years after dropping out. Most find work immediately on dropping out, in this economy of 250,000 vacancies.

I transgress from the subject of this BLOG – Mentally Retarded Teachers!

Ask any student in the 6^th form, just about to leave school to name all the teachers they think have some psychological problem, and my bet is that about a third would be classified as such on some point in the continuum. Why I say, just before leaving is that other students ARE FRIGHTENED TO RAT ON THE TEACHER for fear of retribution, failed mark, preventing from sitting the exams, beatings and sadistic punishments!

The system of recruitment of teachers to schools is wrong! Just having a degree does NOT prepare one to be a teacher, least of all to even know if you have the competency to teach. Very few are taken from Teacher Training Colleges, who have a modicum of teaching knowledge. Ask the question? How many graduates from Teacher Training Colleges got teaching appointments in 2014? My guess 4000.

Sri Lanka DOES NOT HAVE THE CALIBRE OF PSYCHOLOGISTS TO EVALUATE the mental competence of teachers. So foreign experts MUST be brought down to train 100 of the best for this task. An intensive 6 month course can provide the basics. Those getting the certificates must be given an initial monthly raise of Rs20,000, with a promise of further raises depending on competence.

It goes without saying that these initial recruits must undergo thorough psychological evaluation first.

The program MUST weed out the most dangerous and notorious culprits first. Each school has about 5. The problem with security of tenure has to resolved, by transferring them to a job that has NO interaction with the vulnerable school age kids of our society.

It must be remembered that some people suffer from temporary problems, like a troubled child at home, where they take out their frustrations in the classrooms on unsuspecting innocent children. They need counselling, and need to be aware that they are doing something wrong and why. 

IT IS TIME TO MAKE A START NOW if one is to save the lives of children from gross Human Rights Violations!