| Summary: | Maldives is known to the outside world as a paradise on earth. But the real proprietors of this paradise, its own people, have lived in a continuing dark age. They are denied access to knowledge and education, which form the basis of intellectual development. The tragic story of the Maldivian folks is epitomised with real facts in Chapter 1 as a prologue to this work This work claims that two policy decisions appearing at two different times, did actually plant the seeds of the current problems of teacher supply. The first decision came in 1961. It was the introduction of the British Colonial System of Education to a few schools in Male'. The decision may have been precipitated by a desperate need to get trainable people to the labour market. Nearly a quarter of a century later, in 1984, a further decision was taken with immense international pressure to introduce a unified system of education based on a newly developed national curriculum to all the schools in the country. This has created a space, which had produced issues of teacher supply. That space could not be filled at all by Maldivian teachers and this study attempts to examine the real causes. These two decisions came on top of a history of neglect of education by the ruling elite in the Maldives. Thus, not only has this resulted in a small pool of potential teachers, but this study reveals that the pool of educated Maldivians is also very small, contributing to a deep structural problem of low levels of educated Maldivians in general. A powerful framework, consisting of not only the problem solving method but also the critical theory approach, was developed to unmask the causes which had given rise to these problems. In fact, more than three-quarters of all secondary and about a quarter of all primary teachers are expatriates. There has also been attrition for both expatriate and the local teachers causing further problems. It has emerged in this research that in the Maldives teachers work more than 10 hours a day. They work in the night, during public holidays and also in their vacation. At the same time, their situation in terms of income and the status does not appear to be promising although schools need, more than ever before, competent teachers to meet the challenges of the Twenty-first Century.
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