Excerpt XXVII from Moral Goodness In Our Life-time, By Pastor Ajayi James B. C.
In my first year as Principal of a High School, a fifteen-year old girl lied to me on the assembly ground that she had paid me for the English Text book she collected on credit from my office. Two years later, l gave my usual biblical exhortations for the day to conclude assembly meeting. Twenty minutes later the same girl came to my office, kneeling down before my table, she confessed that she never paid for the English text-book she bought two years back.The record was still there that she had not paid for the book despite her claim to the contrary before that day. If l had been too harsh on her over the non payment for the book, she could have considered the punishment as sufficient redemption for the cost of the book, and would not have come out to confess to the truth.
Patience and perseverance is a virtue all teachers should covet.
2.2.2 FAITHFULNESS IN SERVICE.
The teacher’s faithfulness to duty
Please ,of course,portrays him as one of the most faithful and reliable persons in the society. Apart from the clergyman, the teacher is considered to be most honourable as declared by the renowned clergyman, Reverend Martin Luther King Junior, hero of the American civil rights movements in his writing, “Keeping Children in School.”
In Nigeria, the successors to the colonial masters, for example, exhibited a reasonable degree of faithfulness and honesty in their service to the nation except for their social excesses. Even then, they still built good schools and paid teachers’ salaries as and when due. The teachers were dedicated, hardworking and faithful. As of August 1969, when l left Nigeria for further education in the U.S., I left a civil service that was competent, diligent, reliable and enviable, comparable to what I met in Washington D.C. By the time l returned to my country a decade after, the civil service was a shadow of itself, and so was the teaching service.
The second crop of leaders that ruled our nation, at the expiration of the pioneer native governors’ tenure, really went off the honourable mark. Their craving for popularity as well as their greed led them to turn the nation’s treasury to their family’s inheritance.The government could no more pay the teachers.’
(TO BE CONTINUED IN EXCERPT TWENTY-EIGHT)
LEGENDARY QUOTES : “A LITTLE THING IS A LITTLE THING: BUT FAITHFULNESS IN LITTLE THINGS IS A VERY GREAT THING.” – SPEAKER’S QUOTE BOOK BY Roy B.Zuck.
“GOD BASES HIS REWARDS NOT ON CONSPICUOUSNESS OF SERVICE BUT ON FIDELITY TO Opportunity.” – G.Campbel Morgan.
