Dear Editor,
I wish to congratulate all those students who excelled at this year’s National Grade Six Assessment Examination.
It is good to know that the two top performers came from public schools, given a tendency to view education delivery at public schools as ‘inferior’ to that of private institutions. The fact that both of the two top performers came from rural schools, namely CV Nunes and Graham’s Hall, is not without some significance.
This is not to suggest that there is not room for improvement in terms of performance levels of public schools. Indeed, there are far too many public schools that are considered low performing due in part to the absence of any effective accountability framework by the Education Minis-try to measure performance at the institutional level. It cannot be business as usual when schools consistently underperform. These are symptomatic of severe managerial deficiencies for which the Head of the school should be held accountable.
Our children are deserving of the best education possible. Such education should be rounded and broad-based without subjecting them to unnecessary stress levels as is currently the case. The perceived imperative to excel is robbing our children of recreation and play which is an integral part of growing up. This desire to excel is fuelling extra-lessons which places a further financial burden on parents not to mention the deprivation of recreational space so important for our children’s physical and emotional development. Too much emphasis is placed on cognitive development at the expense of the other domains of knowledge such as the affective and sensory motor.
I think both the Ministry of Education and the mass media have to share some responsibility for promoting a culture of ‘high flyers’, without engaging in any serious diagnostic investigation as to what may be the causative factors for the low performance of a critical mass of students, many of whom continue, as it were, to fall through the cracks of the education system.
Yours faithfully,
Hydar Ally
