LETTER | It is very important for us to emphasise the important role teachers play in our nation-building.

Teachers form a very important part of every society in the world including Malaysia. Teachers in the past as well as in present days face many challenges in fulfilling their basic duties and responsibilities; not only to educate students but to ensure the student is able to grow up properly and become useful members of society.

Such a task is becoming more challenging at present. With the creation of new communication technologies and with the world becoming smaller and more borderless, every level within our society including young children and youth are being exposed to many ideas and things.

Such ideas and things can bring good or bad implications. Often we are exposed to issues concerning juvenile delinquencies and social problems committed by a small number of children and youth such as bullying, smoking, drug abuse, gangsterism, and others.

As much as teachers have tried their very best to deal with the ongoing problems, sadly there are some members of society which like to point the finger towards teachers for all the delinquencies and social problems committed by young children and youth in the country.

In the age of social media where information can be spread wildly without proper authentication, any dissatisfaction can easily be uploaded onto the social stream and could potentially become viral. The effect can potentially harm not only the targeted teacher individually but could also seriously jeopardise and even destroy the reputation of our education system entirely.

At the end of the day, no concrete solution would be able to be produced in order for us to cope with the current problems faced by our young children and youth because the focus is merely to find teachers' mistakes and list down the punishment which should be given to the teachers.

It is important for everyone to remember that it is highly impossible for a teacher to properly educate our young children and youth without having full support and cooperation from everybody within the society, especially from the parents.

As such, everybody must play their roles in assisting the teacher to educate our children not only for them to pass the exam but for them to become good individuals and useful members of the society. Society and parents should share the equal burden with teachers to carry out such efforts.

Pointing fingers and finding faults would not serve to benefit anyone and would not help to solve all the ongoing problems faced by our students. Teachers, parents and the society must work together to reduce or to put an end to all the delinquencies and social issues currently being faced by our young children and youth in the country.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.