Every year the CXC results are announced it triggers the annual hand-wringing about English and Maths, and a spate of suggestions about what can be done to rescue the education system. The first thing to be said is that education is a long-term process, and generally speaking, innovations or reforms introduced to bring about an improved outcome take a while to work their way through the system. In other words, with some special exceptions, instant solutions will not happen. In fact, sometimes, as the English authorities found out to their cost at one point, too many reforms introduced too quickly produce confusion and the opposite consequences from the ones which were intended.
The second thing is that under no circumstances should education be made into a political football; it is far too important for that. For those who look back to some rosy era when education was free from kindergarten to university, etc, etc, it must be pointed out that it was under Burnham that education went into precipitous decline. As has been said before in these columns, there were several reasons for this: firstly, there was the abolition of dual control, in circumstances where a bureaucracy scattered all over the city (it still is) was not geared to assume direct responsibility for such a large number of additional schools. As for free education, the country simply lacked the resources to replicate developed world arrangements in that department, theoretically desirable though it may have been, and this was reflected in the deterioration of the educational infrastructure and the failure to make good the impact of inflation on teachers’ salaries (along with those of other public servants).
Then there was the take-over of book importation, which drove the private bookshops out of business in circumstances where there was no television and reading was a pastime enjoyed by people of all classes; the demise of the book culture had a deleterious long-term impact on education in the first instance. This was followed by the decision to provide free textbooks in schools, when again, the nation could not afford it and the Ministry of Education lacked the resources or the capabilities to distribute large numbers of textbooks efficiently throughout the school system.
Arguably the worst thing to lay at Burnham’s door where education is concerned, was the undermining of the professionalism of teachers who had to take children out on the road for political marches, etc. Droves of them either left the profession or migrated to the islands. Hoyte’s infinitely less politicized environment did not change much where education was concerned, because the economy was in a poor state, and his government still could not afford to pay the teachers. In his last years of office the foreign funded Primary Education Improvement Project was introduced, that carried over into the PPP/C term. For the new government’s part, they introduced the Secondary Schools Reform Project.
Despite all the games with the statistics, the truth of the matter is that educational levels have not improved all that much over the twenty years that the PPP/C has been in office – and it was not because they have not thrown money at the problem; they have. They did improve the quality of much of the building stock, although maintenance has proved a challenge, and that which they rehabilitated sometimes deteriorated subsequently.
The third thing to say is that an important factor working against the current administration is the social context in which the education system functions. This is not a rule-governed society any longer, and it is impossible to insulate schools from developments on the outside. Inculcating approaches and ethics which run counter to wider social trends is not an easy task, although partial insulation is perhaps achievable. In addition, education is not a desired goal for many segments of the population; easy money is. The lack of motivation to succeed in school has affected boys in particular, with all the social implications that carries with it. In addition, since in most cases a work ethic is developed in a classroom setting, and the trend is for students just to keep the benches warm because they have to, they acquire none.
The external environment has had its impact on discipline in schools, some of which are positively unsafe for teachers. What one is seeing in some urban locales is a partial reflection of what happens in schools in underprivileged areas of New York, for example ‒ the evolution of gangs. The Ministry of Education has not managed to get its grip on the disciplinary situation, which is admittedly not easy, but has to be done if meaningful learning is to take place at all in its educational institutions.
Finally, on this theme, there is the disappearance of the extended family which took responsibility for all the children who came under its umbrella, and the appearance of the single mother who often works long hours for security companies and has to leave her children unsupervised when she is at work. While she will send them off to school in the morning, she will have no way of knowing whether they attend or not, and given the administrative dysfunction of quite a few schools, they will not miss them.
There are a number of observations which can be made about what research – and common sense – tells us about education, but one or two will have to suffice here. For those who believe that there must be a total overhauling of the system and its approaches to learning, that simply won’t work on a sustainable basis at this stage; what has to happen first is that the current system has to be made to work and be reformed piecemeal.
While there are various issues combining to explain the depressing outcomes in education, there is one which stands out above all others – poor teaching. This is a general statement, of course, as there are still some good teachers in the system. That said, teachers need to recover some status in the society, and they need to be infinitely better paid. According to Andres Oppenheimer, studies in both Latin America and Europe show that those countries where teachers earn the highest salaries, are those which do best in the international education league tables. The teaching service should be seen as something apart from the public service, and the salary scales should be unrelated. This will in and of itself make teaching attractive to much better qualified people, may induce more men to enter the service especially at the secondary level to deal with boys, and will incidentally enhance the status of the profession.
This would require too a much more active, better paid, qualified inspectorate, to ensure that teaching actually goes on in classrooms (it doesn’t in some classrooms at the moment), and if the level of teaching improves, then teachers should be relieved of some of the bureaucratic requirements which currently weigh them down. It is within a context of infinitely better-paid teachers and real instruction going on in the classrooms that the matter of extra lessons can be realistically confronted.
The ministry boasts about how many trained teachers it has now, but this will not have the impact it should have if they do not have a solid basic education, and are not on top of their subject matter. Training teachers with defective educational backgrounds will never produce the desired results that recruiting well-educated persons into the profession will. It might be said too that having a good knowledge base is more important for a teacher than being on top of teaching methods.
While the government does not like to acknowledge it, illiteracy is a problem in the society. Without elaborating on this subject further, what the ministry has to do first is commission a survey on the extent of the problem, which age cohorts are involved, and which geographical areas are most affected, etc. It is only on the basis of this kind of information that meaningful strategies can be devised for the various age groups.
Finally, there may be a case in some areas for arrangements to be made for pupils to stay for perhaps three hours or so, after school or at a centre where books and computers, if possible, are available and they could receive a snack. The parents – or in this case, most likely a mother – would sign the children up for such an arrangement, and if at all possible, would make a small financial contribution to it. How this operated would depend on the ages of the children involved, but they would be supervised and the small ones could be read stories, etc.
