PLACE EMPHASIS ON SCHOOL BUILDING, TEACHER TRAINING

Better build schoolrooms for "the boy"/ Than cells and gibbets for "the man": Eliza Cook, A Song for the Ragged Schools.

There is a compelling need for the Ministry of Education to embark on a massive school building and teacher training programme if it is to aim meaningfully at a crucial target audience of not only primary and secondary school students, but pre-school children and drop-outs as well as adults, many of whom were never part of the education process.

A not insubstantial portion of the increased revenue expected both from the revision of the oil and gas tax regimes and from increased crude and natural gas production should be invested in education with emphasis on skills development. As I have stressed, repeatedly in earlier columns, the around-the-corner full impact of globalisation and with it the unrestricted entry of cheaply produced and/or cheap in quality goods will displace our products even on our own shelves and create uncomfortable levels of unemployment.

And while we will not be able to stem the tide of imports, we must train our young people to gear themselves to seize employment opportunities, right though to the highest level at the heavily computerised energy-based industries that will be attracted here as a result of our crude and natural gas. The country will need to have an explosion of in-house skills. Facilities should be in place to allow for persons interested in acquiring these skills to receive training to a minimum associate degree level.

The three-month and six-month training programmes offered at the centre at Laventille or at the several skills training centres across the country must not be viewed as ends in themselves, but rather as appetisers. The expanded programmes will enable those qualifying the opportunity to offer their skills, whether in welding, joinery, masonry or as pastry makers, dress designers and makers, interior designers, landscapers, electricians or draughtsmen to clients. In the process additional jobs are created.

In turn, we should seek to escape the old colonial mentality of believing that the attracting of investments must begin with overseas capital and investors from the United Kingdom, Western Europe and the United States of America, and that this is the sensible and only approach since they have the technology, the skills and the capital. This is fallacious thinking encouraged by the western (first) world.

CL Financial, guided by Lawrence Duprey; Guardian Holdings Limited, Trinidad Cement Limited; Neal and Massy Holdings; Republic Bank Limited; RBTT Financial Holdings Limited; among others, have long exploded this myth and demonstrated that technology can be purchased, skills can be contracted and capital can be acquired. Needed ingredients are vision, a bankable workforce, the courage to take charge and even to take temporarily unpopular decisions, and to hold before you, always, the larger picture. A critical aspect will be domestic savings along with the ability of Trinidad and Tobago, if not to be the company’s first market, to supply required quantities of energy, specifically natural gas.

Meanwhile, whether the capital to be invested is wholly or in part domestic, regional or international, or whether the technology can be acquired or the skills contracted, it is better for the country overall if the skills needed can come from within the community, and this not excluding the construction stage. The demand for skills today is great and skills levels which would have sufficed 30 and 40 years ago are no longer applicable. Take for example specialist welding. It is a mere few years ago that specialist welders had to be brought in because there were no such in the country at the time to execute a particularly demanding project. If we make our education and the rewards of education attractive enough then more of our young people will be motivated to remain, understanding as they do so the opportunities to get ahead. In addition, persons who have dropped out of school, as I never tire of pointing out, will be encouraged to return. If we fail to motivate those in the classroom to remain and to make it exciting enough for the drop-outs or the "graduated" underachievers to revisit the classroom experience and give themselves the chance to be achievers we will continue to breed an army of the disgruntled.

What the Ministry of Education may wish to consider is the employing of a firm of public relations consultants to produce a comprehesive PR programme aimed at marketing education and its bearing on needed levels of achievement, not only to children of school age, but to their parents and the wider community. If we fail (and trying hard we shall not fail) to bring the widest possible audience back to the classroom, and keeping those there and commit them to studying we will be also-rans in the race to make our young people achievers.

We must understand that the old methods can no longer be regarded as relevant. And instead of the old system of dismissing some children as backward and, what was that phrase of 40 or 50 years ago, educationally sub normal, because they were not academically bent, we should separate our secondary schools, for example, into three streams - academic, vocational and manual. All streams will be in the same schools, where this is practicable, rather than "separating the wheat from the chaff."

It will build self-esteem in the slow learners, as not only will they be in a school with achievers, but they will not suffer the constant indignity and hurt of being compared unfavourably with them, laggards as opposed to front runners in the same classrooms. We have seen the results today of 150 years of dismissiveness and neglect. At the same time we have seen the results of 150 years of not enough schools and trained teaching staffs to man them. We have seen this today in the uncomfortable rise in drug-related and other gangland slayings. The price has been too great. Globalisation will make it yet worse.

Eliza Cook was right in that it was better to build schoolrooms for the boys, than cells and gallows for the men.