Align education to energy

The Ministry of Education should conduct a wide ranging appraisal of the curricula of the country’s early education centres and primary and secondary schools as well as the planned curriculum for the proposed University of Trinidad and Tobago, bearing in mind the relative importance of energy and energy- based industries and factor the outcome of these studies into its ongoing re-designing of curricula. Special emphasis should be placed on the curriculum of the John S Donaldson Technical Institute and the San Fernando Technical Institute. There needs to be a cultural shift in the school curricula, which will take note of this country’s continuing emergence as an industrialised nation, its growing entrepreneurial class and the need to pursue new and cost cutting methods in large, medium and small industrial plants and /or businesses and agricultural farms.

The Education Ministry will need to minimise the emphasis placed today on certain subjects, as well as jettison as needless baggage long outdated teaching methods, in much the same way that we consigned Latin and Greek, for the most part, to the dustbin of educational history. In short the Ministry must establish priorities, although not in a vacuum, but through liaising with the representative teachers’ body, and with school principals, who should be requested to submit ideas. This will involve Principals holding discussions with their teachers, with specific reference to their being asked to list the teaching methods which they have found to best achieve stated goals, and the purpose both of these goals and the teaching methods they are required to employ. Trinidad and Tobago has to have clear lines of demarcation at the secondary level between academic and technical Schools, introduce Practical schools and lay greater stress on the across the board competent teaching of Mathematics, Science, Commerce, Geogaphy, History and Literature in the secondary academic schools, and on Commerce, Book-keeping, Modern Welding, Plumbing and Skills Development overall in the secondary technical schools.

Our teachers must be in a position to develop their children intellectually and otherwise, so that when they graduate and begin to work in the country’s various plants and factories and what have you, there is optimum efficiency. This will result in a reduction in the cost of production, which will make our goods more competitive not only in the regional and international, but domestic market place as well. The accent has to be on efficiency. This will not be achieved either by teachers who are not trained up to today’s standards, or by their holding on to methods of teaching which bear no relation to today’s needs, including social needs. All of the country’s primary and secondary schoolteachers should be required by a cut off date to have Bachelor of Education degrees, and it must be demanded of them and our University of TT lecturers that they attend refresher courses to keep abreast of the latest teaching methods, as well as the latest in their respective fields. The rationale will be to place and keep our young abreast of international trends, and where applicable place our goods and services in a competitive position.