A salary increase will not fix the education system

by time news

Raising teachers’ salaries is the spearhead in our daily effort to raise generations of students here, but it is not enough, it is only the beginning. Giving our children a good education is in the interest of all of us, so why can’t the Ministry of Education, parents, teachers and students unite around it?

Now that the school year has started successfully and the strike crisis is behind us, we can stop for a moment and talk about the real challenges in the education system.

The first challenge we face is strengthening the status of the teacher. There is no doubt that the status of the teacher today is not one of the highest. It starts with the small things like arguments of parents about the placement of their children in a certain class and reaches the big things like the way of studying. After all, if you visit a doctor or a mechanic and receive a recommendation from them for a certain treatment – you will not think for a moment to challenge their decision. Unfortunately, there is a general feeling that the teacher cannot be trusted, that the parents always know better what is best for their children. And this needs to be changed and corrected, since the teachers are the professionals for our child’s education and we need to restore the status that was lost along the way.

How do you do it? It starts with investment, providing deeper and broader training, improving employment conditions in order to attract students with higher potential. At the same time, the barriers to entry into the system must be opened (mainly shortened training and a compensation plan) and more talents with proven successes from the business world, motivated by a sense of mission and love for education, must be brought in.

The second challenge is the fixation. A large part of the concept of what the education system should look like and how the school routine of our students should look was left behind while the world moved forward. Why does a lesson have to be 45 minutes, can’t 20 minute lessons be more effective? Who said you have to study with a blackboard? Why don’t we transfer some of the lessons to nature and the yard instead of the regular classrooms?

The corona taught us that it is possible to change relatively quickly, all you need is motivation. Unfortunately, at the end of the corona, most schools returned to the old and familiar method and not necessarily through the fault of the educators. We as administrators of education systems are required to drive the changes. The more we recognize and understand that the world is changing, and the system must change with it, the faster we will be able to improve it.

Another challenge is the relevance of the teacher in the eyes of the students. Today, when a large part of the information is available to everyone on the net and some lessons can be replaced by self-learning, teachers need to find a way to be relevant. It is not the transfer of technical information that is important here, but the personal, emotional accompaniment, originality and creativity. It is necessary to invest in teacher training in everything related to emotional education – a teacher must understand what a student is going through just by looking into his eyes or reading his body language. A student should see a teacher as an address for sharing successes and crises.

The last challenge in my view is the relevance of the material studied, the structured study programs should be reduced as much as possible and students and teachers should be allowed to research, develop and build a curriculum for the various subjects – a flexible and dynamic program as possible. The school should give the student tools on how to learn to conduct research and less on memorizing and storing information. The Ministry of Education took a first step towards this with the reform of the military professions, but a lot of work is still ahead of us.

We all have to make this joint effort, hand in hand with the Ministry of Education, local authorities, teachers’ organizations, teachers, parents and students. It’s a common interest – and better sooner than later.

The author is Yossi Memo, CEO of the Future Education Network

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