Pity indeed that our education system is not afforded the luxury of leaving the previous year’s difficulties behind at the start of a new academic year. We know, for example, that children in some state schools will start the year in schoolhouses with less than adequate furniture and that some buildings might themselves be in need of repair.
As far as teaching/learning and the curriculum are concerned there are also issues upon which we need to reflect at this time. There is still the persistent shortage of teachers and the inability of the education system to recruit the best and the brightest to be trained as teachers. There is simply no way around what, indisputably, is a chronic and debilitating shortage of teachers in mathematics and the natural sciences, particularly.
Nor does there seem to be any end to the wholly counterproductive manner in which we analyze our examination results, though no amount of tinkering with the outcomes disguises the fact that more than half of our children who sit Mathematics and English A at CSEC routinely fail these examinations.
This year again, as in previous years, the real movers and shakers in our education system will be those teachers who offer private lessons to children from around Grade Six right through the secondary school system. Extra lessons are a generous income subsidy for those teachers who offer the service. They get the patronage and the schools take the credit.
The fact that – year in, year out – the proliferation of extra lessons notwithstanding, we appear unable to secure at least 50% passes in Mathematics and English A bears out that extent of the problem that the education system faces.
It must come as a disappointment to ordinary working parents that the promised ten thousand dollars per parent per child has not been made available on time for the start of the new school year. When account is taken of the fact that the education subsidy announcement was initially made since March of this year, one is at a loss to know why according to Minister Manickchand, the payout will not begin until October. It points, it seems, to the likelihood that the subsidy decision may have been made at relatively short notice and that the Ministry of Education is still thinking through the logistics of getting the monies to the parents. As things stand some parents may well have to wait until the new school term to receive the subsidies.
There are other start of year issues that will have to be addressed in the coming weeks, chief among which is the distribution of the Ministry of Education’s free text books to children. Not least among the issues here is the fact that there never seem to be enough books to go around. It is a bottleneck that often prevents children from getting off to the best of starts.
One of the more interesting media releases issued by the Ministry of Education in recent times was published on July 3 this year and had to do with an initiative known as the Hinterland Education Improvement Programme (HEIP). The programme seeks to bring the quality of hinterland and riverain education on par with that which obtains in the coastal classrooms. The release sets out a number of interesting observations which it says were made by parents at Lethem during an exchange with the Minister of Education in June. It says that the issues raised by the parents include effective classroom performance by teachers, the need to design and implement parental education programmes, the need for more materials to support teacher training programmes, additional space in schools to accommodate the growing school population, the need for adequate electricity in schoolhouses and the more effective utilisation of materials by teachers.
Interestingly, according to the release, the residents of Lethem also expressed concern that the current curriculum does not cater for the local context. That raises an important issue that will have to be addressed by revisiting text books, among other things.
These observations which were reported to have been made to Minister Manickchand by the Lethem parents go to the heart of some of the chronic deficiencies affecting the delivery of education in the interior, so that the Minister and her officers would do well to embrace those views as they proceed with the implementation of the HEIP.
The school year would have begun yesterday with the customary challenges which will take some time (hopefully very little time) to address and resolve. In the course of the next few months we should see the Education Bill being addressed in the National Assembly. That speaks to a longer term view as far as the development of our education system is concerned. As the new school term progresses, therefore, we must hope that it will bring with it the overall qualitative improvement in education which we have long been seeking and, frankly, so greatly need.
