University Assignment: Common Good Principles and Teachers' Support

This essay examines the application of Common Good principles to address the issue of inadequate support for teachers in Australian schools. The author argues that teachers often lack autonomy, face verbal abuse, receive poor salaries, and work with inadequate resources. The essay emphasizes the importance of administrators showing solidarity, ensuring respect for teachers, handling complaints impartially, and educating students about the challenges teachers face. The conclusion advocates for the use of Common Good principles to improve teachers' working conditions, promote their dignity, and provide the necessary support for them to effectively perform their duties. References include several academic sources on education and teacher well-being.

Running head: PRINCIPLES OF COMMON GOOD
Principles of Common Good
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1PRINCIPLES OF COMMON GOOD
Common Good is defined as a sum total of the social conditions that allow people,
whether as individuals or as groups, to reach levels of fulfillment quickly and easily. Common
Good is something that concerns itself with the progress of human beings. Any society which
intends on and wishes to serve the people living in it is a society that is committed to the
principles of Common Good (Hammersley 2017). This opinion essay applies the principles of
Common Good to the problem of inadequate support for teaches in schools with the aim of
understanding how the Common Good can be used to resolve this situation.
Teachers in Australian schools have in recent years been faced with a predicament that
makes it difficult for them to perform their duties as well as they otherwise can. Teachers more
often than not, lack the autonomy that they need to do their jobs properly. They cannot often
discuss the ideas they would like to in the class, out of fear that they might hurt sentiments upon
doing so and they have to follow the course curriculum strictly when imparting their teaching
duties instead of encouraging students to be creative and to think out of the box. Teacher bashing
is very common in today’s day and age (Maclean 2019). I do know that teachers of Australian
schools are often at the receiving end of verbal abuse because their students are incompetent and
unable to understand what is taught in the class. The salaries of teachers in Australian schools are
also quite poor, with teachers not making more than seventy thousand dollars in a year even after
they have been teaching for five to seven years. Additionally, the Australian media has played a
role in portraying a negative image of teachers in the recent past. Newspaper reports have
focused more on why it is that teachers are not focusing on their duties and where they are going
wrong instead of trying to empathize with the challenges that they are faced with. Teachers in
Australian schools often have to make use of inadequate infrastructure when imparting lessons.
They lack the equipment and the facilities required at times to teach crucial concepts pertaining

2PRINCIPLES OF COMMON GOOD
to science and technology to their students. Furthermore, it is seen that administrators are more
eager to side with students and their parents and family members if things go wrong and little or
no concession is shown for the long and hard hours that teachers have to put in, to perform their
scholastic duties that include taking lessons and correcting all student assignments (Anderson et
al. 2019).
In my view, the principles of common good are something that can be made use of by the
owners and administrators of schools by showing teachers solidarity and allowing them to do
their work with dignity (Carpenter 2017). Administrators need to make sure of the fact that
teachers are shown respect by their students and the rules and regulations established by teachers
in the classroom are taken seriously by students and are not flouted. I believe that complaints that
are made against teachers should be viewed and treated with impartiality and objectivity and
both sides of the situation, that is, the perspective of the student and the perspective of the
teacher will have to be taken into account by the administrators in order to make sure that they
are being fair to teachers in the given situation. I also believe that students in schools must also
be made to understand that teachers are human beings, that they can mistakes too and that their
duty is to be attentive in class and obey their teachers instead of trying to defy them and rebel
against them all of the time (Yang 2018).
In conclusion, I argue that the principles of common good must be made use of by
administrators and owners of schools in Australia in order to improve the lot of teachers in both
the private and the public sector. Teachers in Australia are faced with the arduous task of
imparting lessons and training students using limited resources and their pay is quite negligible
too. Common principles must be used in my view, to show solidary for teachers, make sure that

3PRINCIPLES OF COMMON GOOD
they are treated with dignity and respect and provide them with the support needed to do their
duties well instead of constantly being criticized for it.

4PRINCIPLES OF COMMON GOOD
References
Anderson, M., Werner-Seidler, A., King, C., Gayed, A., Harvey, S.B. and O’Dea, B., 2019.
Mental health training programs for secondary school teachers: a systematic review. School
Mental Health, 11(3), pp.489-508.
Carpenter, D. (2017). The Quest for Generic Ethics Principles in Social Science Research',
Finding Common Ground: Consensus in Research Ethics Across the Social Sciences (Advances
in Research Ethics and Integrity, Volume 1).
Hammersley, M. (2017). Communitarian Principles That Will Increase the Damage Done by
Ethical Regulation? A Response to ‘The Quest for Generic Ethics Principles in Social Science
Research’by David Carpenter☆. In Finding common ground: Consensus in research ethics
across the social sciences (pp. 19-27). Emerald Publishing Limited.
Howes, L.M. and Goodman-Delahunty, J., 2015. Teachers' career decisions: Perspectives on
choosing teaching careers, and on staying or leaving. Issues in Educational Research, 25(1),
p.18.
Maclean, R., 2019. Teachers' career and promotion patterns: A sociological analysis.
Routledge.
Yang, Q., 2018, October. Symbiosis Principle: The Basic Principles of the Community of
Common Destiny. In 3rd International Symposium on Asian B&R Conference on International
Business Cooperation (ISBCD 2018). Atlantis Press.