A national survey found that 30.1 percent of elementary, junior-high school and high-school teachers were unhappy with their jobs — the most common cause being having to communicate with children for their parents.
The survey by Shi Hsin University’s Opinion Poll Research Center found that these teachers on average gave themselves a score of four or less on a 10-point happiness scale, suggesting deep unhappiness, the Future Taiwanese Education Society told a news conference yesterday.
Forty-one percent of teachers gave themselves a score of more than six, showing that a larger number of educators are satisfied with their jobs, a center spokesperson said.
Photo from Yeh Ping-cheng’s Facebook
The leading cause of unhappiness among teachers is being asked by parents to help with parent-child conflict, as educators consider this a responsibility of the child’s parents, the center said.
The second most significant cause of unhappiness among teachers are the unrealistic expectations parents and the government have, which result in an unreasonable workload, the spokesperson said.
That was followed by a fear of being falsely accused of mistreating or abusing children, the center said.
The government should seek to stamp out false allegations and help educators fighting to protect their reputation, society chairman Yeh Ping-cheng (葉丙成) said.
Government agencies too often demand that educators take part in policy initiatives without providing an action plan, guidelines or directives, while the Ministry of Education seems to accept the demands of other ministries with no care for the burdens placed on teachers, he said.
Kaohsiung and Penghu, Nantou, Miaoli and Changhua counties are the areas with the happiest teachers, but Chiayi City, Chiayi County, Tainan, Hsinchu City and Yilan County have the least happy teachers in the country, Yeh said.
A few areas were left out due to insufficient data, he added.
The distribution of teacher happiness seems to indicate that educators are happiest in rural regions and least happy in urbanized and developed areas, which could reflect the cultural differences in parents’ approaches to education, Yeh said.
Urban parents are more likely to demand their children get good test scores and turn the screws on teachers should their children fail to meet their expectations, he said.
Teachers tasked with managing a class or performing administrative duties were significantly less happy than those who were not, he added.
The society called on the Ministry of Education to reject other government agencies and offices’ bids to place unreasonable burdens on teachers, push harder for the digitization of paperwork, create realistic timetables for implementing policy and repair parent-teacher relations, he said.
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