MAKE LEARNING ATTRACTIVE

The Ministry of Education should seek to make the learning process as appealing as possible, whether at the pre-school, primary, secondary and/or adult classes level. Depending on the design and quality of the thrust, this would assist not merely in keeping students in the classroom, but in encouraging parents and other adults as well, who may have been dropouts and/or low achievers, to make optimum use of the opportunities for advancement being offered today. There is a need to attract dropouts back into the classroom. Strategies will have to be developed and properly executed which would induce those who did not complete their education, to attend adult education classes.

But it should not stop there. They should be encouraged to view attending classes and educating themselves not as the end, but rather as stepping stones to better preparing themselves for the future. Meanwhile, regardless of the spin that the Ministry of Education may put on today’s Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) examinations and its ability to place all of the 19,883 pupils registered for the SEA, the reality is that many of the entrants are neither prepared for the exams nor for taking the next step in the secondary education level. Too many primary schoolchildren appear to be under-prepared, and too many parents are lulled into believing that the mere placement of their children represents achievement.

It is a false approach in which both neglected schoolchildren, who end up as low achievers, and the country are the ultimate losers. The education system and the curriculum it has advanced, clearly have not been designed to reach out and have not reached out effectively to many children if we are to go by the harsh reality that in past years many of those who sat the SEA made as low as zero percent! And many others just marginally above this. Yet, instead of the Ministry dealing with the problem at its base, it has preferred the public relations and politically appropriate approach of “promoting” them to the secondary level.

Many children at the primary school level have opted out mentally from the education process while others opt out physically and dropout of the system. This should be seen as a weakness of the education system, a lack of concern and/or ability of some of the teachers and an absence, in all too many instances, of positive parenting. The nation’s first Prime Minister, the late Dr Eric Williams, once declared that the future of Trinidad and Tobago rests in the schoolbags of the children. Today, the future hardly rests in the schoolbags which are not only fancy and expensive but also sadly are fitted with many things other than books.