Should a Teacher be Held Solely Responsible for a Child's Failure

When a child is performing poorly in school, the parent of the child points accusing fingers at the school management who in turn transfers the entire blame to the teacher. Is it entirely true that the teacher is 100% responsible for a child's failure? 

This is the exact scenario in privately owned schools. The teacher is always the scapegoat when a child fails & performs woefully. Privately owned schools are funded by money generated from school fees & the teacher's salary is paid from such money so it is expected that the teacher should be an extraordinary being and be able to perform miracles.
The teacher is expected to be a magician who should be able to change ordinary glass into diamond, turn sand into gold, & create genuis from intellectual liliputians.

The teacher is the only professional who is expected to produce results even when other things are not in place. When a doctor treats a patient properly and the patient does not respond to treatment no body blames the doctor for the state of the patient. When a doctor prescribes drugs & gives directions on how the drugs should be taken and a patient either refuses to take the drug or does not adhere to the doctors directives no body blames the doctor when the patient condition does not improve.

When a Pastor or Imam preaches his sermon and people still continue in their sinful ways no body questions the Pastor/Imam that why are people still committing sin with all your sermons. We have lots of churches & mosques yet evil, violence, oppression is on the increase & the perpetrators of these evils are members of churches/mosques yet no Pastor or Imam has ever been arrested or held liable for the rise in evils & wickedness in the world.

For a teacher to succeed there must be cooperation between the child, the parent, the school management & the teacher. A teacher is like a shepherd who is there to guide the sheep(child) & when the sheep(child) is willing to be lead there will be positive results. A teacher can have a good grasp of the subject he is handling and be very good when it comes to explanation but the best efforts of the teacher will yield nothing if the child refuses to go back home and go over what has been taught. 

Home-work are meant to reinforce what has been taught & they are used as means to actually evaluate the extent to which a child has understood a lesson. Take the case of a child who is not doing his  home-work & the parent are less concern about this behavior but at the end of the day the teacher will be held responsible for the failure of the child. The teacher in this case does not go home with the child so it is the responsibility of the parents to enforce it on their children to do their home-work. The school management should also design ways in which to deal with such children who fall into this category & make sure that such children change their ways.

We should also take note of the fact that no matter how skilled a Carver may be that he won't be able to carve anything good how of rotten wood. The same applies to teaching. How can a child get to year 8 & can't perform basic addition & multiplication. The mathematics teacher will only waste his energy & effort but will achieve little or nothing with such a child because that child lacks the basics requirements to cope with that class. Now how did such a child pass through year 1, 2, 3,4,5 etc without being able to perform basic addition & multiplication. 

The school authority must ensure that before a new intake is admitted or an already existing child is promoted to a particular class that a minimum requirement must be met. This is hardly the case in private schools as any Tom, Dick, & Harry that shows up is admitted into any class of their choice. The entrance examination has become a mere formality.

A teacher should not be turn into a scapegoat for a child's failure. The success or failure of a child is tied to the following institution & people:

• The parent.
• The school management
• The teacher.
• The religious bodies.
• The society
• The environment 

We shall be looking at the roles played by each of these stakeholder in the success or failure or a child in our future posts so please stay connected.

Your comments, contributions & questions  are highly welcome. Please share the posts with your friends & loved ones. We will appreciate it if you can subscribe to our blog to receive our posts directly delivered to your mail.