The Teachers’ Service Commission (TSC) has mooted new entry requirements to the profession. The Bachelor of Education degree course now stands to be scrapped. The commission wants potential teachers to pursue a degree course in either arts or sciences and a one-year post-graduate diploma in education (PGDE).
Interestingly, students will now take three years in university, then proceed for the post-graduate diploma in the fourth year. This is not a new issue. Over the years, those holding these degrees were later required to undertake the education units (PGDE) to become teachers. There are many in the profession who never did this PGDE and the TSC has really frustrated them even though they may be very good teachers.
Teaching profession
For the BEd, the subject contents ran concurrently with the education units for four years, which is the same amount of time it will take to become a teacher after the one-year PGDE that TSC is muscling. The recommendations being pushed are justified shamelessly by comparing the teaching profession to law, medicine, engineering and accounting, which have professional bodies that oversee them.
Teaching has never had such regulatory bodies in Kenya. Teachers have only had trade unions, which have been slowly and surely strangled. TSC is not a professional body. It is the employer towering over them in a merciless manner.
The mandate of TSC is expanding to the level that they are now taking up the task of setting the curricula of tertiary institutions. The TSC now seems to have the power to tell the universities and colleges what to teach and how to teach it.
National examinations
Sadly, the silence from those ivory towers is itself baffling. TSC is now making the curriculum and we should not pretend to be surprised when they take over even the tasks of making the school syllabus, setting and monitoring national examinations and all other facets of education in the country.
The main thrust of the changes is that they want teachers who will specialise in three subjects, not two as is the case. The great roundabout being taken is due to inability to satisfy teacher-demand because of economic conditions and the fact that soon, we shall have secondary schools bursting at the seams with the CBC graduates moving in at junior secondary. They need a teacher that can be used to the full to stem the shortage.
In the early 1990s, BEd graduates came out of universities in large numbers. To accommodate them, many secondary school diploma teachers were pressed down to teach in primary schools. They were replaced by their own students and the unhappiness it caused has never been fully quantified. Let us pretend the new policy is for the good of our education but we know its hollow depths. BY DAILY NATION