Your Problem is Your Problem

        The vexatious part of politics is that during the election campaign, every political enthusiast – or politico-maniac as neologism may define it – propagandise the slogan: Your Problem is My Problem. Post elections, when one is at the helm of power, the same words, or actions, manifest to demonstrate that Your Problem is Your Problem.

        Whether those lines are crafted on the spur of the moment or with the intention of hilarity, the recent commentary by the Minister of Education about the teacher transfer was grossly unwelcoming. As a figure who has dominion over the Ministry, speaking illogically at this magnitude inside the august parliament house only signals how scornful and contemptuous we are regarding the already dwindling veteran teachers that are triggered predominantly by the miscarriage of deployment business and tsunamis of faltering avowals from the Education Ministry.

                On the one hand, we bellow of teacher attrition as grave educational anxiety that demands the immediate engagement of different stakeholders to moderate the injury to our education system. On the other hand, when we hit on the right cord to discuss within the circle of the nation’s prime lawmakers, we lampoon with hypothetical and impracticable metaphors thereby, only rubbing salt to the injury. This paradoxical fascination of teacher attrition and retention has now become a phenomenon in Bhutan that everybody knows but nobody really knows.  

            By status and power, parliamentarians are the privileged populace that has the closest access to His Majesty the King’s visions and aspirations. Listening to their discussions, however, gives the impression that they are still thousands of miles away, for they appear to have never hearkened to the Royal vision for education. 

                If what we heard is correct, questions for any MPs are filed a week ahead of time before addressing them in the National Assembly. One week is a lavish amount of time for anyone to research and generate meaningful data, especially when it comes to the issues surrounding teachers. After all, the syndrome of teacher deployment crisis and its consequences continued as one of the immortal issues in the cellar of educational forums for over decades now. 

            History has it that issues such as quality of education, teacher deployment, teacher workloads, and improving teaching environments were on the catalogue of discussions since the evolution of the Annual Education Conference almost 2 decades ago. Closely following, every annual education conference held until today still recites this same inventory. With inconspicuous outputs from these conferences every year, it has now largely camouflaged as the Olympic event of the Ministry of Education, held annually for school leaders to review the same issues that emerged many moons ago. 

 

            What we fail to realise when we arrange a conference of such scale are the cumbersome costs it has to the government coffer – especially to the Kingdom like ours that runs on a shoestring budget and where development plans are predominantly conceived based on foreign aid. 

 

            If we as citizens are seriously concerned about these national educational disasters, even if we cannot discover the pill to cure it, by now, we would have generated some indigenous prescriptions to nurse the cause. In the simplistic sense, it is time that we attend to these issues seriously and practically rather than throwing gibberish opinions. 

Image courtesy: Click LINK

                By the time I finished writing this perspective, the video had gone viral on social media, attracting over a thousand comments. Many people appeared to find it comical and hilarious, while others despised it for its hollowed viewpoint. 

            As a teacher who was disconnected from my family due to this transfer whirlpool for eight years during my twelve years with the education ministry, I did not observe even a morsel of amusement or material in the discussion. In contrast, it resembled me more of a harangue or a sarcastic rage for the miscarriage of our education system. 

                Categorically speaking, even as a retired teacher, it aches my heart when people in higher social hierarchy taunt already impoverished teachers who are taking the humongous role in architecting and engineering the future of our generations despite sterile work settings and withstanding the drought of societal succour. 

            This inflicts me with a conviction that, teachers’ problem is teachers’ problem and nobody's problem. And that the erosion of teacher attrition will visibly perpetuate in the land of our education system.