Academic bias in our schools

While TTUTA would like to congratulate all the CAPE scholarship winners and wish them well in their future endeavours, it is sad to notice that little or no attention is paid to the non-academic areas of studies such as the technical vocational areas.

The failure/refusal to bolster the technical vocational areas is and will continue to cost our country in terms of economic and social development. Over the last decade the construction sector has been plagued with a shortage of skilled labour and the gap had to be filled by fellow Caricom nationals, among others. This situation could have easily been avoided had the authorities seen it fit to bolster the already existing technical vocational capacity that already existed in many of the nation’s schools.

Rather, these excellent facilities that once produced thousands of skilled craftsmen and technicians during the late seventies to the nineties were left to deteriorate and waste away. The decision to discontinue the training of teachers to fill technical vocational positions in these schools created a huge vacuum when people in these areas retired.

The net effect of this was the reduction of options available to students to pursue technical vocational subjects. Principals in many of these schools were forced to virtually shut down their technical vocational departments and shunt students into traditional academic subjects.

This development did not unfold without the protestations of TTUTA, for there were repeated calls for the authorities to ensure that technical teacher training be given adequate priority following the absorption of the John S Donaldson Technical Institute’s technical teacher training programme into that of the University of Trinidad and Tobago.

These calls were repeatedly ignored and TTUTA expressed the view that there was an apparent attempt to gradually nudge technical vocational subjects out of the mainstream school curricula. This was against an unfolding realisation by the international community that had gone that route that technical vocational education belonged within the school system.

These subjects allowed students to learn with their hands and gave thousands of them a sense of purpose and renewed meaning for school. It allowed many who were weak in the traditional academic areas to regain their self-esteem and confidence, allowing them to connect their school life experience with their own realities.

This sense of self-confidence and self-worth was then transferred to other areas of their development.

While the arrangement had some challenges, the discontinuation of these subject offerings at secondary school has come at a great social and economic price.

It is imperative that the country takes stock of this gap in our human development quest and revive the technical vocational education sector as a means of filling the skilled manpower shortage as well as a means of treating with the burgeoning problem of deviance, crime and violence among our young people. Subject offerings at schools must be broad and varied to engage a wide range of aptitudes and preferences from the cognitive to the psychomotor.

All children must be given an equal opportunity to nurture and develop their innate talents and there must also be equal standards of recognition by the national community for those who excel beyond the traditional academic subjects.

We cannot build a globally competitive economy with academic graduates only.

The long-term national development plan must be able to identify the projected manpower needs of the country and this must then inform the diverse range of curricula that is offered at the nation’s schools.

Scholarship winners must reflect this diversity of curricula.