Teachers should focus on education and students

We are gravely disappointed with the education minister's recently ruling allowing school teachers to take active part in politics. From the educational point of view, such move endorse by the minister is some sort of selfish and it is a very bad decision.

We must understand that the responsibilities of the school teachers are to provide education to our students and in order to ensure these students' success, all teachers should fully utilize all their resources and focus on the students performance and their works.

Just imagine if teachers were to be allowed to participate actively in politics, what will the school become in future. Will all these politician-teachers be able to focus on their educational duties and responsibilities? Are they going to take medical leave or emergency leave very frequent in order to attend to political functions? If these politician-teachers were missing from their classrooms, will there be any effective replacements to ensure the students' lessons are not delayed?

So, what is the core reason that the education minister had decided to allow school teachers to participate actively in politics? Yes, the chief secretary to the government had said that the teachers play an important role as community leaders, but unfortunately he did not mention that the teachers' most important role in our society is an educator. The above reason is not a good justification at all.

The motive behind the decision to allow teachers to be active in politics are clear. Umno and BN had admitted that they are short of intellectuals. That is why they wanted to pull of those teachers out from their educators' role in order to help them fight the emerging opposition Pakatan Rakyat parties.

What will happen then in the end of the day? The students and their parents would suffer. Students would suffer because of lack of focus and attention from their teachers, while their parents would suffer the same fate because they will need to spent more for their children additional tuition classes outside the school.

Those teachers who are now politicians will spend much of their time politicking in schools and the absenteeism rate of these politician-teachers would definitely pose a very big problem for the schools, because they would care less for their students and go all out to fight for political positions in the party instead.

The other reason, the quality of education will also decline and deteriorate as politician-teachers who have close political ties with their party leaders will get promoted, thus sidelining those real qualified teachers who deserve the promotions. As the result, those deserve qualified teachers would be demoralized because of such politicking in the educational sector.

Finally, the winner of such implementation would be Umno and BN, while the sore losers are the education system and the people. The children will start failing in their examinations, parents will start to worry about their children every now and then , thus neglecting their career and work in their offices, more money will be spent to send these children to business-like tuition centers who in turn will take advantage of their high demand. There goes nothing but all the nightmares that our people would have to endure into.

Did you see it? The impact would be very serious. Do you want this to happen to your children and family? Why do we need to suffer for nothing, just because these selfish Umno and BN leaders are short of political talents and intellectuals in their establishments?

Do you want to see teachers blackmailing us one day by saying "vote for BN or Umno and I will provide your child a better education"?