Improving education

The Ministry of Education wants to ensure that all secondary school teachers have pedagogical training. To this end, the Valsayn and Corinth Teachers’ Colleges will be transferred to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Tertiary Affairs, becoming adjuncts of the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT). It is not clear why this move isn’t being done under the aegis of UWI’s School of Education, which has been providing teaching certificates for secondary school teachers for decades now. But, be that as it may, this new initiative is a crucial step to reforming the national education system. When the regime of Dr Eric Williams began expanding the secondary school sector in the late 1950s, the primary motive was political rather than pedagogical.

Its spokespersons may have convinced themselves otherwise, but the record shows that building new schools was a far greater priority than training teachers to impart knowledge effectively. So secondary education in the late 1950s and 1960s was characterised by a low ratio of university graduates to non-graduate teachers, especially in the new government schools. Moreover, while expenditure on education was unprecedentedly high for a Caribbean country, it was still only six percent of the First Five Year Plan (1958-1962). Although the Education Ministry still gets the lion’s share of the annual national budget, expenditure on education is now even less — little above four percent of Gross Domestic Product, whereas seven percent is considered essential for developing nations.

The result of putting political goals above pedagogical ones 50 years ago have borne fruit now in a 40 percent failure rate in basic subjects at CXC, as well as the spiralling crime rate. And the best way — perhaps the only way — to reverse these trends is to ensure that the country has effective teachers at all levels of the system. It took 25 years to clear the backlog of untrained primary school teachers, and that was aided by slowing of birth rate in the 1970s. In announcing the new training initiative last Thursday, Education Minister Hazel Manning did not give a time-frame — but we hope it will not be two-and-a-half decades. However, as is the habit of local politicians, Mrs Manning made her announcement before the fundamentals have been put in place. A plan for staffing the colleges is still being worked out, and even the model for teacher education has not been decided on yet.

As regards this latter, we can definitely say that a complete revamping is needed. This country’s education system is a hierarchical one inherited from the colonial authorities and, while race and colour biases may have been largely removed, class bias has not. The system is geared towards middle-class students and this, more than advanced teaching methods, is why students from the prestige schools do reasonably well at exams. For such students, the chalk-and-talk method can work, but for students coming from backgrounds without books or educational toys or even quiet, school is an uncomfortable, mystifying, and boring place. It is that vast majority of students who teachers must be trained to give knowledge to, if we truly want to solve our myriad social problems and create a just and prosperous nation.