Getting inside a child’s mind

THE EDITOR: Many of your readers have identified education as the factor to extricate TT society from its downward spiral. Many are the suggestions that have been made to improve education and cure society’s ills. Permit me to add my t’uppence worth.

Yearly promotion by exam results, whereby a child has to demonstrate that it had grasped some pre-determined fraction of what it had been taught, as a prerequisite to advancement to the next stage of its education, seems to me to be the solution to quite a few of the problems faced by the education system of TT.

Firstly, children, as a breed, are highly competitive and this alone would provide them with a strong incentive to apply themselves and perform. No child wants to see his/herself left behind by their peers. Further, this removes the oft heard complaint of teachers that they cannot themselves perform to their best if they are attempting to teach a group of very mixed abilities. At least this way they will be guaranteed a certain minimum standard of their intake.

Also, the pressure on the students to achieve this minimum standard will encourage them to adopt as their “peer idols” those students who consistently perform academically, rather than those who can buck the system in the most imaginative or “cool” way. If you can just “keep your head down” and “go with the flow”, who needs work! Young people are not stupid; shortsighted yes, but not stupid.

IVOR ST HILL
Port-of-Spain