Tomas Nehale
Recently, unemployed teachers had organised a peaceful demonstration – seeking for job opportunities.
The teaching profession is known to hastily absorb the unemployed graduates, but nowadays, things have changed, and business is no longer as usual.
Back in the days, a qualified teacher would not stay at home for a year without being employed. Now, the question is, are there seriously no job opportunities for teachers that are roaming the streets?
Furthermore, what really went wrong? It seems the teaching profession is saturated.
To shed more light on this subject with the little understanding that I have, allow me to synoptically put this dilemma under a microscope.
Biased career guidance
Learners are mostly exposed to the teaching profession than any other careers, and in most cases, teachers tend to be their role models in every element of their existence.
Hence, most students opt for the teaching profession, because teachers are most likely to influence their career choices. As a result, this would involuntarily blindfold them, and forget about other better careers out there.
Maybe, this happens because their career scope is limited to teaching.
Therefore, schools need well organized career guidance programmes that would be able to expand the career scope for the learners in order to sensitise and introduce them to other professions, careers and tertiary institutions.
To ameliorate this situation, schools should host profession related tours – this can be done by taking learners to visit and acquaint themselves with different tertiary institutions and workplaces such as hospitals, banks, parliament, mines, garages etc.
By doing so, learners would get to know that there are a variety of careers with good perks, consequently, they would get impressed and enticed by different professions.
Furthermore, career guidance facilitators should not be subjective when guiding learners to choose their careers or field of study; instead, they should consider learners’ skills, ability, aptitude and passion.
Increasing universities and education faculties
Back in the days, there had been few teachers training institutions in Namibia, namely, Unam main campus, Ongwediva, Rundu, Katima Mulilo and Windhoek College of Education. The aforementioned colleges were believed to be producing roughly about 2000 graduates per year, by then, and all were likely to be employed immediately after their graduation.
Another challenge is that there are many teachers training institutions such as the six Unam campuses, IUM, IOL etc. Roughly, all these institutions produce an aggregate of 4 000 graduates per annum, of which only approximately 600 teachers are likely to be employed per year and the rest would join others in the streets.
Meaning, the current graduate figures have doubled the then figure. If we are to put it on the demand and supply instrument, supply has overwhelmed demand – which is supposed to be the contrary.
Hence, we find situations whereby a single teaching post is being attended by hundreds of interviewees.
Inadequate schools
I assume most of the schools were built before independence and few were built post-independence era, although I don’t have concrete figures to substantiate this.
But, do your research! To put this into context, the population has significantly boomed post-colonial era, but few new schools were built to adequately accommodate all the learners. Supposedly, the number of schools should have been increased to synchronise with the increasing population.
As a result, this has lead to imbalance teacher to learners ratio in Namibia.
The recommended teacher to learners ratio is supposed to be 1:35, but at several schools, the ratio is being compromised drastically.
For instance, there is a certain school that has 70 learners in a single classroom (1:70).
This is already a disaster! Therefore, I think the government must prioritise on building new schools or develop existing schools by constructing new classroom blocks in order to overcome the imbalance teacher to learners ratio.
This would, however, create new space for the unemployed teachers to be absorbed up the system.
In conclusion, I’m not saying unemployment is just common in the teaching profession, neither I’m saying we shouldn’t opt for teaching as a career.
In fact, unemployment is everywhere.
But, nowadays, the traditional mindset of saying if one studies to be a teacher – his or her chance of getting a job is secured, is very wrong! Hence, we should refrain from such mentality.
There are nice and copious professions out there waiting for fresh-blood. Above all, follow your dreams and passion.