Competent teachers are perennial students
What you need to know:
Teachers are so critical to a country; they give us the tent poles on which we hook our careers.
- Yet, a majority of them graduate without an iota of understanding on how technology is reshaping the education sector, much less the rest of the sectors.
If teachers – at all levels – do not have the appreciation, skills and confidence to use basic technology, how can they be expected to model and mentor the young scholars?
Our country is light years behind in modernising one of the most important sectors of development – education. Education systems the world over are undergoing regular retooling in tandem with the changes wrought by pervasive and disruptive technology.
If we don’t observe the ongoing tech-powered changes in our society or learn from the recent past, and use those experiences to forecast the direction technology is driving various careers, we risk heading south while the rest of the world is heading north. We will be trailing other countries and our workforce will be incompatible with the needs of the 21st century.
Experts have noted numerous times that Kenya’s education system, or Africa for that matter, does not encourage reading and research after graduation. We do not have well-equipped and modern libraries to spur research and continuous learning.
MARKET NEEDS
A country of over 40 million people has only a handful of bookshops. The Internet provides an alternative space and rich resources for learning, but because reading is not Africa’s valued skill, most people would rather spend tones of time scouring the net for other reasons.
Training institutions need to be ultra-sensitive to market needs; they need to keep their finger at the pulse of the market and where changes are needed, upgrade their programmes accordingly and swiftly.
The traditional red tape at the universities, where courses have to go through long, time-consuming and overly deliberative bureaucratic processes, does not auger well for the fast-paced tech-engineered changes.
All universities and colleges have to relook at their programmes at least twice a year and gauge how well they are aligned with new tech-reliant market needs. They need to arm their students with the right skills and tools to keep their careers evergreen.
COUNTRY'S DESTINY
Take the teaching career, for example. This is without doubt the dominant government workforce in the country. Teachers are so critical to a country; they give us the tent poles on which we hook our careers. They model the labour force for a country; yet, a majority of them graduate without an iota of understanding on how technology is reshaping the education sector, much less the rest of the sectors.
If teachers – at all levels – do not have the appreciation, skills and confidence to use basic technology, how can they be expected to model and mentor the young scholars? The role of teachers is to teach, and for them to be better purveyors of knowledge, they need to be regular students themselves.
They need to attend short targeted courses at pre-defined intervals. Teachers need to be regularly watered with cutting-edge knowledge so that they can flourish and, similarly, nurture our children and forge the country’s destiny.
DIGITAL SECURITY
As a minimum, teachers should understand the ins and outs of social media so that they can advise and support the young minds who spend most of their time out of the class, online. They should understand the intricacies of search engines such as Google and other such tools, and how to use them to mine the right information.
They should understand the basics of digital security and how to keep themselves and their clients safe. Teachers should know, even if peripherally, how professions that their students aspire to be part of, are being disrupted by technology and use that knowledge to monitor their clients.
In this professional upgrade for teachers and schools, time is of the essence.
The writer is an informatics specialist. Email: [email protected] @samwambugu2
