Editor’s Comment: Cut out the dead wood in education

Teachers have slated the Basic Education Department’s plans to install tracking devices at schools to catch absent teachers.

This is in reaction to Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga’s plans to install a biometric electronic system to ensure teachers arrive on time for work and spend the required number of hours educating our children.

According to reports, the teachers say energy will be wasted on policing instead of finding the root cause and getting rid of the problem.

A Human Sciences Research Council study revealed that 10-12 percent of the country’s teachers were absent on any given day – mostly on Fridays and Mondays. That, in itself, is a telling observation.

Contributing factors, the study found, include drug and alcohol abuse, depression, frustration, hypertension, poverty and a lack of commitment.

From our experience here in Zululand, we believe running sideline businesses should have been added to the list.

National Association of Professional Teachers of SA, Basil Manuel, went into defensive mode, citing these examples as the reasons for the high absenteeism rates.

The point is, all organisations and companies have employees suffering from or battling with any one or a combination of the above ‘factors’.

But they have internal systems in place to curb opportunistic absenteeism very smartly. If they don’t, they will cease to function and collapse.

Those teachers who so vehemently complain about being ‘tracked’ are no doubt the minority exploiters who have little passion or interest in educating our youth. Naturally they will resist anything that will expose them and stop their salaried loitering, robbing our pupils of fulfilling their full potential.

They are the enemies of our children.

The majority of hard-working and dedicated teachers will have no fear about a tracking system. Why should they if they are always on duty, performing their noble task? As it is, their already challenging work is made more difficult by those parasitic colleagues.

Our view, therefore, is for the Minister to ignore the flimsy excuses to paper over the cracks and get on with the job of clearing out the dead wood from the education sector.