There is something uniquely irritating about the high-sounding pronouncements and promises customarily made by Education Minister Shaik Baksh. His latest undertaking, that in 2011, 2000 teachers will be trained in Information Technology apparently to the point where they can teach the subject in the nation’s schools, takes the cake as far as his amazing pronouncements are concerned. “Within the next year, when you have the computer laboratory here, you will have two quality teachers to teach Information Technology,” is what the Minister is reported to have told residents at Mahdia.
The problem is, of course, that the Minister’s pronouncements are usually long on rhetoric and short on details. Mr. Baksh has not said, for example, who will undertake the training that will enable 2000 teachers, some of whom probably don’t know the first thing about computers to become sufficiently proficient to be teachers of Information Technology by year end.
Mind you, it is the same Minister, the same Ministry, that has been unable to sustain its ambitious countrywide Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) Programme for primary schools, among the reasons being that the radio and recording equipment have fallen into disrepair or else, are lying idle for lack of batteries. It is the same Minister and the same Ministry, which, just months after introducing an Associate Degree programme at the Cyril Potter College of Education announced that we do not have enough teachers for some subjects after all and that we will therefore have to import teachers. It is, further, the same Ministry and Ministry which appear not to have a clue as to what to do to cope with the problem of violence in schools. Please, Mr. Baksh, spare us any further promises!
2,000 teachers trained in what is left of 2011 and to a level where they are equipped to teach Information Technology? Come on Minister! Surely pigs will fly first.
At Teperu the Minister is reported to have said that “if we are to get a child-friendly school the first thing is to have proper water supply in the school, for sanitation.” You’re probably wrong, Minister Baksh. Child-friendly schools require child-friendly children. You really need to do something about the violent gangs reportedly posing as schoolchildren and, Sir, whatever you do has to go way beyond putting Welfare Officers in Schools.
And even as the Minister is talking up IT teachers and water for sanitation we are receiving reports that in Port Kaituma the children below the age of sixteen are opting to mine gold rather than go to school. Let’s face it, Mr. Baksh, those schools at Port Kaituma couldn’t really be that child-friendly, could they?