Two of the indispensable ingredients necessary for a child’s successful education are a home life conducive to learning and good teaching in school.
Improving the quality of family life is a rather complex matter, admitting no easy or short-term solutions.
Our concern today is the quality of teaching in our public school system.
There are many excellent teachers in the system who have dedicated their lives to the education of generations of young Bahamians.
Through mastery of their subject matter as well as a passion for imparting this knowledge, these teachers have contributed significantly to national development.
Today, many teachers find themselves in the position of having to act as surrogate parents for student’s whose home lives are extraordinarily difficult.
Indeed, the range of disciplinary problems confronted by teachers makes an already challenging profession even more difficult.
Still, the quality of much of the teaching in our public schools is poor and weak. Why is it that some of our students in Family Island schools with small classroom sizes and a superior student-teacher ratio, still leave those schools with weak literacy and numeracy skills?
It comes back to the quality of the teaching.
