Celebrating the lives and value of educators on retirement
IT IS a privilege for me to offer words of gratitude in celebration of the teachers who are being honoured here this evening.
As a former teacher myself, and now teacher educator and academic, I appreciate the enormous importance of your work over many decades.
Those honoured tonight were born in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. They have completed a range of teacher training programmes at the certificate, diploma, degree and postgraduate levels. And, they would have attended teacher training colleges such as Hewat, Wesley, Perseverance and Sally Davis, and universities in the region.
Some of them would have completed two-year post Standard 8 (Grade 10) teacher training programmes and have gone on to become stalwart foundation phase teachers over many decades.
Some have worked their way through the ranks as post level one teachers, then heads of department and deputy principals. And some became remarkable principals; men and women, who came to personify and carry with them the aspirations of their communities; educational leaders, who, by force of principle and personality, forged educational communities, in the cauldron of struggle and difficult circumstances.
The retiring educators provided generations of children the knowledge and skills for their students’ and communities’ advancement and social improvement. Our children would have acquired under their tutelage the intellectual resources to make choices, and to live wholesome and constructive lives.
The teachers understood that our students do not survive by knowledge acquisition work alone, and they would therefore have provided them enriching extra-curricular offerings in a range of sport and cultural activities.
It is on the basis of their educational, cultural and sporting contributions that teachers established important embedded connections in, and with, their communities.
We honour the retiring teachers in acknowledgement of their decades long sacrifices, patience and endurance, and their quirks, foibles and humanity. We honour their families who, too, made enormous sacrifices… The purpose of this evening is to give thanks, to say shukran, tramakassie or simply dankie.
Tonight, we express gratitude towards them for their lives as teachers; their service, sacrifice and commitment to education and the upliftment of their communities.
Their lives as professional educators have been informed by values of sharing, caring and being human, and, they, in turn, have made their students more properly human.
It was their gratitude – inspired practices as teachers which made them fully present in their communities’ lives. Their constructive, passionate and enduring impact manifested in moulding exemplary behaviour and ethical conduct among their students.
They refused to be side-tracked by ingratitude, heartlessness, a lack of remorse or harshness. The productive teacher is never beset by negativity, selfishness or a destructive mindset.
There are no riches or profits to be made from being a teacher, a realisation they embraced the moment they stepped into teaching. They are committed to the moral worthiness of teaching, teaching for its own sake, and for the contribution it makes in shaping society and people.
These teachers allowed their students to acquire the skills of embracing the unknown, the complexities of life, and importantly, they imbued their students with a discerning spirit, an ability to love, to laugh, to appreciate beauty, to fight, to resist and oppose, to collaborate and co-operate, in other words, to figure out how to establish productive lives in this complex world.
As they lay down the baton of their formal teaching lives, they leave us with a set of intellectual tools, ethical values, and practical commitments. It is now up to the new generation of teachers to use their example to confront the challenges of the present and the future, as we enter the so-called fourth industrial revolution, a world dominated by social media, automated intelligence, political anomie and corruption, and disease and violence, in which our commitments to social justice are being stretched and challenged.
It is now up to us to take over the baton and emulate the beautiful example set by the retiring teachers being honoured here tonight. Our task is to figure out ways of serving our communities into the future, a future which they have secured.