Education system setting up children for failure

According to Harris, they are being set up to fail.

He was addressing the issue of children with learning disabilities during his monthly live Facebook chat Ask the Archbishop yesterday from Archbishop’s House in Port of Spain.

“We put everybody into this grammar school education and there are a lot of people not capable of grammar school, so we produce failures and then we want to know why there is crime,” Harris said.

Results of the 2017 SE A exam revealed that just over 2,000 students scored below 30 percent.

Education Minister Anthony Garcia has since advised that children under the age of 13 have the opportunity to resit the exam next year if they wish. Recalling his time when he sat and passed his Exhibition exam, he said the pass mark then was 50 percent and to gain entry to St Mary’s College was 80 percent.

“The whole system is crazy.

Now you putting it down to 30 percent to get into a secondary school. If that child can’t get more than 30 percent, is that child ready for secondary school where the curriculum increases tremendously? But we force them into secondary school to do what? To fail?” He feels SE A should be scrapped and suggested that each school do its own evaluation of their students in going forward with the child’s education.

He said the SE A exam continues to put not only the children under “too much stress”, but parents as well as they try to ensure that they get into their school of choice.

So bad it has become, that Harris said it has reached the point where children no longer enjoy school vacations.

He remembered as a child, spending his “whole holidays, holidaying.” “There was no such thing as private lessons and this and that and the other. We had a holiday, and I am no less intelligent for that.” He said not allowing children to enjoy their vacation time amounts to violence as violence was not only “slapping them up,” but “violence is taking away from them the things that they need to do as children. Its awful.” Harris lamented that education system has not yet started looking at “learning styles and aptitudes,” and it is the reason every child is being put into “this grammar school education.”