Issues in education - Commentary

The school principal is employed and given a mandate which is explicit, either being outlined in a job description, or implicit as evidenced by the utterances of the political head of the education system, to raise the performance of his/her school. This usually means that the principal must ensure that the students in his school perform to meet or exceed the national average of performance that students have set. To ensure that he/she achieves this goal, the principal has to work with a team - senior teachers, teachers, students, administrative and ancillary workers,  parents and other stakeholders achieve his/her goal. How does the principal do this? He/she has to be a human resource manager. That is, the principal has to devise policies and strategies to motivate the human beings whom he/she manages to work towards contributing to the goal that the education directorate has set for schools generally and his/her school in particular. This is part of the thrust of human res...

Display mounted by teachers in training I watched about five minutes of the recent Oscars presentation on television, not because it wasn't a good show but because I had things to do that I considered to be more important than watching the spectacle. In the five minutes or so that I watched, I learnt much, not from what was going on on-stage, but from my viewing companions. From them, I learnt the names of some of the guests in the audience, I learnt about the actors who were nominated in the category of "Best Supporting Actor" and I learnt about my companions' opinions of the movies and actors nominated in this category, as well as their views on who should win and why they should win. This was information that was new to me since I cursorily follow the goings-on of pop culture. In five minutes, I got a lesson on an element of pop culture. From this lesson, I came to a realisation about the process of learning in schools, colleges and universities and all o...