President: Are schools making our kids dull?

Are schools arousing our children, or making them dull? So asked President George Maxwell Richards as he opened a “Symposium on Critical Thinking in Teaching and Learning” at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine, yesterday. Richards, a former campus principal and retired lecturer in chemical engineering, said this question was posed when he recently visited the London-based Institution of Chemical Engineers. The institution, he recalled, had said UWI offered a solid programme, but also had queries. Richards added: “They felt our degree programmes could perhaps be a little more adventurous and challenging, more cutting edge, more experimental and more innovative.”

He wondered whether our children at school were truly appreciating the many mind-boggling changes occuring around us in every area of life.
“We must pause to ask ourselves whether our education system has kept pace with these changes, and whether what we teach, how we teach, why we teach, and how and what we examine have any relevance to what the world truly requires of the young people for whose development we have responsibility.” Richards said we should reconsider education at all levels. Given new discoveries in how the brain develops and in how children learn, he asked: “What is the link between what researchers are discovering and what pre-school teachers are doing and practising in the classroom?” He questioned how we were teaching our children in primary schools. “Are we stimulating them? Are we developing in them a love for learning? Are we helping them to discover themselves and the world around them? Are we encouraging them to reflect on things? Are we prompting them to dream? Do we transfer to them the importance of the act of creation, the value and significance of discovery?”

In contrast, he added: “Or are we just making them dull, uninventive and narrowly-focused towards examinations, which seek to stream our children for life at the age of 12?” “Was secondary school a place of learning and creativity?” he pondered. He queried whether our scholarship winners were still here or instead living and working and contributing to the more industrialised world. Richards wondered whether our A’level and university graduates were making their best possible contributions to the professions, institutions and society. “And what about the 70 percent or so of our students in our secondary school system who, on the basis of examinations, range from modest performers to poor quality students?

Did they experience the joy of learning and the impact of quality teaching?” he wondered. Richards said he had lived through the system and has reflected on these questions, although he didn’t claim to have the solutions. He urged: “We must take education much more seriously and we must engage each other, perhaps the entire nation...” Saying we were moving faster and faster from an age of things to an age of mind-over-matter, Richards said that today’s world required new approaches to learning. “Developing the capacity to learn is more important than what is learnt.” Noting the global standardisation in areas like currency, taxation, language and commercial law, Richards said: “Our university has an even greater responsibility to educate and train our people to seize opportunities thrown up by these rapid changes.”