A Word from the Editor

With growing concern and increasing alarm, I have, of late, noticed a number of publications advertising “crash” courses on teacher training and education which purport in all falsehood to be offering a degree of “Profesor”certified by one foreign or native entity or another (some of them, without a shade of doubt, of the most dubious reputation). One such alien institution happens to be offering an exam in in Argentina to become a certified “International Teacher of English”. Who could certify that you are in fact, “international”? the UNESCO or the UN, no doubt. No luck! A provincial college somewhere in the UK. What is the legal status of such certification in our country? If you dared to tour the offices of the relevant educational authorities in your district, you would learn what blushing for a good reason is all about. Obviously, the catch lies in offering in a few months what normally takes any ordinary human being at least four years (in the best of cases) to get. Those shortcuts are dangerous and expensive and, as the time-honoured saying goes, a fool and his money are soon parted. In a related development, but perhaps more dangerously still I have recently seen an ad, supposedly published by the City of Buenos Aires, offering a certificate as “Lider Educativo” after 2 months of online training and 8 weekly visits to a school (all this seasoned with 4000 pesos a month for the daring one, who has to be a student in the last two years of secondary school).One can only hope and pray that this certified leadership programme does not intend to place our children in the care of these obnoxious certificate holders.

Dr. Omar Villarreal
Editor