Akin to Moses and the Israelites’ divinely led desertion of Egypt, Jamaican educators have taken this renowned account as a guide to flee overseas — synonymous to the Promised Land — to prosper.

This has created an atmosphere of uncertainty across the Jamaican educational landscape, and come September morning the Ministry of Education and Youth (MOEY) will surely be held accountable for this predicament if it is not properly resolved. Suffice to say, the current education system has yet to yield, or properly produce, adequate benefits to our beloved and esteemed educators, who have consistently gone above and beyond to ensure an effective learning environment for the up-and-coming generations.

Though not a new phenomenon, Jamaican educators have always sought better remuneration packages and higher standards of living globally; however, they have awakened from their lengthy stupor and have decided that enough is enough.

This 2023 exodus is different. There appears to have been an unprecedented number of resignations, and advertisements from high schools filled the pages of The Gleaner‘s Career section a couple weeks ago. I surmise these numbers will grow exponentially by mid-August.

Jamaican teachers are, unfortunately, among the lowest paid civil servants across the public sector, and despite their low wage packages, they have served their country with commendable patriotism and patience for decades. In order to permanently keep our educators local, we must compensate them in keeping with their true monetary worth to proactively prevent irreparable damage to our tottering education system.

Furthermore, the education system is not only being filled with discouraged, underpaid educators, but the system appears to be financially malnourished, or so it seems on the surface. According to Stefan Trines, research editor for the World Education News and Reviews, in his 2019 article ‘Education in Jamaica’, Jamaica, as at 2012, was in fiscal deficit for 44 of its 50 years of Independence, which subsequently led to the imposition of harsh structural adjustment programmes from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

It was reported that due to resource and capital shortage, the education sector in 2012 and onwards was severely impacted. So it begs the question: What will happen when the Jamaican Education system faces an eventual regression and all its skilled educators disappear to their promised land, never to show face again? Or is it that our parents will become the new teacher replacements come September?

The profession of teaching has been around for thousands of years and has been integral in knowledge transmission and the moulding of constructive behaviour in the classroom. This is by no means an easy task, as teachers must contend with a wide array of ideologies, world views, and attitudes from students who are both eager and unwilling to learn. According to Oneil Madden in his 2023 Jamaica Observer article titled ‘Is the Jamaican education system a failure?’ teachers often encounter oversized classes, where they have to deal with different learning styles and intelligence types, all done without the presence of teaching assistants. Oftentimes, some even buy stationary and learning resources from their own pockets just to ensure that the students’ learning needs are met and to mitigate disruption of the learning process.

Lack of appreciation for teachers in Jamaica dates back to Independence. During the infancy stage of the modern education system, teachers were often victims of elitism and classism. Dave Rodney, in his 2022 article ‘Walk down history — Evolution of education Jamaica’ spoke with veteran teacher Dr Ena Campbell, who said that in the 1940s and 1950s high-quality teachers were being churned out from traditional teachers’ colleges; however, some of them weren’t hired due to the elitist and classist framework of the school system at the time.

Imagine your years of physical, emotional, and financial investment to become a trained educator being dishearteningly wasted and tarnished? Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised that history is repeating itself, although the context is slightly different: Jamaican educators are being reintroduced to a modern-day slavery in the 21st century, whereby they aren’t paid their monetary and social value.

With Jamaican educators leaving the island at a prodigious rate, it will be interesting to see how the Minister of Education and Youth Fayval Williams will solve this chronic issue. Williams has told the public that there is no need to worry about teacher shortage but has not quelled the rising animosity among Jamaican educators, who have been patient with the education system.

In a recent article by the Observer titled ‘No classroom crisis’, Williams pointed out that the number of advertisements of vacant teacher posts have been exaggerated by social media.

In hindsight, maybe this is the hard-hitting educational reform that Jamaica deserves in order to take our educators seriously. Time and again countries have conducted numerous headhunting exercises to hire our educators, and this has proven to be an effective method to strengthen their own educational institutions. Clearly, these foreigners are simply cognisant of the fact that Jamaica refuses to take care of its teachers.

Some of the popular locations to which our educators migrate include but are not limited to Canada, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, England, China, and Japan. These developed nations are, however, not without their own share of troubles, as their native educators are also leaving for elsewhere. Jamaican teachers are hired to fill these gaps and are able to have a much better standard of living than they did working in Jamaica.

At the end of the day our educators simply wish to be respected, and to “eat a food” too.

Dujean Edwards is an adjunct lecturer at the University of the Commonwealth Caribbean (UCC) and a graduate of The University of the West Indies, Mona. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or dujeanedwards@gmail.com