Manners

I was picking my grandson up from the day care centre .As we were leaving I told him to say " Bye " to the so called teacher which he did .And what happened ? The lady ignored him and that was too much for me >I told my grandson " Lets go , your teacher is too busy to to reply" giving her a glare.Only then did she say " Bye'.Not only this she did not have the courtesy to say hello to the parents who went there to pick up the kids.Manners, courtesy? these are things which we teach our children from young and when you have these kind of people influencing our kids from young what can you expect when they grow up? I have been to so many schools and pre schools and can judge the nature of the schools quite quickly and easily.The tone of the school will get down to you straight away.Teachers and students would have an aura of friendliness and politeness.I was so impressed with one school which I visited..the moment you enter the school the students would walk up straight to you and greet you.teachers would smile at you and ask you if they could help you.I commended the Headmistress and told her that I was impressed and proud of the way she trained her students and staff.Sad to say there are very few schools of this standard. This day care centre never even bother to teach their students the proper way to wear their shoes.the kids will just sit on the floor and wear their shoes.Whenever I happen to see this happening I would tell my grandson "Aaron, wear your shoes on the bench"> The teachers never seem to hear this. That is why I believe teachers should be professionals .Not any Joker can qualify to call themselves teachers.It is scary that we choose to leave our children with these monsters who are not academically qualified ,trained or cut out to be teachers.Some of probably are unemployed housewives trying to make a quick buck.During my time as an education officer I would make sure that the kindergarten provided me with a list of their teachers and their qualifications and more than 3/4 of the schools do not have qualified teachers.I shudder to think of the damage which they can do to the young developing minds and what kind of education they can provide.Its actually a matter of convenience for parents to send their kids there without bothering too much about things like this.As long as there is somebody to look after their kids without too much of a problem parents are contented to let things be. For us educationists this cannot be acceptable because we understand that teaching of values during the formative years is critical to what sort of person the child can turn out to be .It breaks my heart to see some parents trying to " teach " their children and in the process doing more harm than good. teachers are not trained for nothing.We learn child psychology, teaching methods,understanding the physiological and mental development of the child before we are allowed to teach.Some parents think that they can do what a teacher does and try their hand at teaching and the result can be disastrous as you can readily kill the child's interest for learning at an early stage and put him off learning in his later years. It is because of the educational system that children do not get the right kind of training but then what can you expect when there is no quality control over the people whom we allow to "teach" our children.Hence we have a generation of people who have no manners, respect for the elders and generally low moral values.We are responsible if we produce a generation of people with no proper social etiquette, manners and values.