The roller coaster ride to ensure educational quality
Bereket Gebru
Education sets a country in a developmental and democratic path; and in the current age of globalization, it is a key tool that makes a country fit for strong competition from others. It is well known that countries that had the chance to develop and others that are on the path to development have given their utmost priority to education.
For example, for the past 30 plus years China has been giving continuous priority to education and training. In the final years of the 20th century china had over 65 million vocational trainees, showing the country’s commitment to the sector. India, the other country exhibiting rapid development, is expected to have a very large amount of computer engineers within a few years.
Expansion of education, especially quality education, has lots of benefits. The first key benefit is having a country with a large number of educated man power easily enables technology and production transfer. To produce using latest methods and joining the competitive global market requires not only cheap labor but also the utilization of trained and easily trainable educated man power. Having educated and better trained man power provides a chance for using technologies to improve production methods. This reduces production costs and time to engage competitively in the global market.
The timely achievement of a democratic system would also have a better chance in an educated community. Though the knowledge and application of democracy does not necessarily need educated people, their presence in large numbers creates a culture of exercising democracy better through reading and writing. This is the second key importance of the expansion of education.
Expansion of education also let’s us narrow the income gap. If society was left to be led by the law of markets only, the income gap between citizens would widen to form a big crisis. In order to narrow the income gap one of the methods to implement is providing social service, especially elementary education, for free to all citizens. Government uses the funds it raises through taxes to construct elementary schools in villages to narrow the income gap between citizens.
Although we have not attained optimum results yet as it takes a number of actors to ensure quality, the government has proved that it has set educational quality as a priority.
Maintaining the quality of education requires building schools, the provision of books and teaching aid, designing strong educational system and training qualified teachers in large numbers. It also demands making in and out of school situations suitable for the physical and psychological development of students.
Cognizant of these facts, the government has made significant efforts to fulfill the above stated requirements and registered encouraging results. Accordingly, in relation with the educational system, it has been designed to incorporate vocational and academic educational streams besides endowing them with civil and ethical values.
There have also been repeated efforts to solve internal and external problems that disrupt the teaching/learning process in schools. Various measures have also been taken to motivate teachers and raise their professional and ethical standards. Teachers’ employment and recruitment has also been made to be based on their interests rather than on quota. Teachers’ trainings have also been organized every winter to cover all. The salary of teachers has also been adjusted to be the highest among public servants in every pay grade.
Despite the above mentioned positive situations, we cannot say that teachers have the capacity to accomplish their mission of imparting quality education. Not being prepared enough to help students grasp the required knowledge along with problems in shaping students portray civic and ethical values are exhibited in not a small number of teachers. This problem should be viewed as a strategic danger to our sparkling educational victory.
Citizens with developed civic and ethical values play a major role in democratic nation building. Obviously, citizens lacking these values cannot accomplish their roles. In cases where the country is faced with temporary problems, such people make the problem worse than becoming problem solvers. Therefore, arming the youth with civic and ethical values should be a priority area in our educational system.
There still are problems discouraging girls’ education. Early marriage, hard chores etc are still factors that limit girls’ education. In general, the male supremacy evident in the society has gone down to schools to influence the education of girls in various ways.
Another major relatively contemporary challenge is the changing attitude of parents and students about education. Education has long been considered as the only viable way to change one’s life and guarantee success. It has been taken as the way out of absolute poverty since the start of modern education in the country. Recent trends have, however, harmed that reality with both students and parents sensing that engagement into money making would benefit more in the long run than sticking to education.
The abundance of university graduates who have not been employed has pushed the change in attitude even further now that degree holders are working as janitors and waiters in various establishments. The perceived worth of education has gone down considerably that people prefer to engage in trading activities that require less or no skill. The fact that the monetary return in such engagements is extremely higher than most jobs that require a university degree or more exacerbates the situation. With a thousand percent of profits in some of these trading activities, the lure of money in such sectors is way more than the extreme salaries we hear about in rare cases.
Therefore, education is becoming less attractive to the average student and their parents. The social appeal of education that allotted a university graduate with a good deal of respect is fading fast with some negative opinions held among many about them these days. The heavy reliance on addictive substances and the partying at any cost attitude a considerable number of university students have is casting its shadow over the worth of education in society.
These problems should not be allowed to linger. No matter what our developmental stage is, the worth of education should be kept right on top to ensure that better professionals who can tackle social and economic problems would be much more available. Therefore, we need to take concerted action to solve them.