LETTER OF THE DAY - JTA a failure
Published:Monday | June 17, 2013 | 12:00 AM
THE EDITOR, Sir:
The entire leadership of the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA) needs to be booted for having failed the teachers miserably. Mr Clayton Hall, president of the association, will demit office in August, leaving behind a failed legacy.
Teachers should be in a position to move a no-confidence vote against a sitting president. They are having problems with the minister of education's pronouncements because they have signed on to the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-influenced contract blindly.
The Government has blindfolded and hoodwinked the JTA into accepting the glass half-full when all we are seeing now is an empty glass.
I watch helplessly as the bickering continues between the teachers' union and the Ministry of Education, and I expect that both parties will sit around the bargaining table soon. When you meet around such table, we, the teachers, expect consensus that will benefit both parties on these thorny issues. What I don't expect is to hear that the JTA has bargained away our rights because of some form of expediency, nor do I expect a win-lose situation.
The time has come for teachers to take back the society, and we can only do so by acting with the highest professional standard. It is unfortunate that Doran Dixon and Paul Adams, past presidents of the association, have allowed their testosterone to get the better of them. They should have tempered it with the oestrogen of Nadine Molloy, another past president, whose professionalism and decorum soften critics during her tenure.
Crusade against teachers
There are elements in the society who are anti-teacher and who will do all in their power to discredit the work of our educators. What is so disturbing is that those who are on a crusade against teachers should be thanking teachers for helping them to think independently.
Education cannot be quantified, as I have seen some education bystanders trying to do. It is not like printing and selling newspapers that one can put a cost to it. Wake up, society, and defend teachers, because we are the midwives for all other professions. We cut their umbilical cords and breathe life into them.
HARVEY BROWN
Teacher/Administrator