SETBACK IN EDUCATION — TIME FOR NEW APPROACH

“What shall I give my children? Who are poor/who are adjudged the leastwise of the land?”: Gwendolyn Brooks, What Shall I Give My Children? The figures released in the House of Representatives on Friday by Minister of Education, Senator Hazel Manning, that 45 percent of the students who sat English last year in the CXC Examinations and 50 percent of those who took Mathematics failed are a sad indication that all too many of our young people continue to slip, education wise.  It represents a setback in education and while not the result of indifference by any single Ministry of Education since Independence, yet is a result of a combination of factors that must be tackled vigorously by this and succeeding Education Ministries, by parents, by the children themselves and by society.

But the answer must not be viewed simply in the context of the construction of additional schools and the provision of more teachers, although these are important, but in formulating a new approach which will give education a wider, more meaningful appeal and make it attractive to all students. In addition, strategies must be formulated which will seek to encourage not just the relative few but all parents to become involved. The involvement urged on them must be, inter alia, in the area of the establishing of a structured approach with respect to the supervising of their children’s studies at home; their leisure time and the persons with whom they lime. Education is not the sole responsibility of the Ministry of Education and its high profile advance guard, curriculum planners, teachers and school supervisors, but must be clearly understood as being a function shared with parents and/or guardians and in a sense the wider community.

Educationally ill circumstanced parents and/or guardians should not seek refuge in the argument that because they were dropouts from or non-achievers at school that they were not in a position to supervise their children’s study time at home. Their firm presence and with it the tacit insistence that laid down minimum hours of study must be followed will suffice. The truth of this was illustrated by a young man a few years ago. He was of a family of humble circumstance, and when both of his parents died, his elder brother, who was working, had accepted the responsibility of seeing after his welfare. His brother would insist that he had to study every night and would sit in the room listening to the radio or otherwise occupying his time. On occasion he would request that his younger sibling show him the work he had done, and sometimes would tell him firmly that a feature of it was wrong and he should do it over.

The boy eventually did reasonably well in school, and it was only after he had graduated and was working that his brother called him and told him he had something to say, something he had hidden from him all those long years. He confessed that he was dyslexic (though that was not the term he had used), had never known how to read and write, but he had to maintain the pretence of going over his homework, because he wanted him to succeed, and not be the relative failure he had been. We have to make learning more appealing, more attractive to the nation’s children. One way is by treating vocational skills development as the equal of academic education. We have to restructure our education system, for example, so that all of our secondary schools with the exception for the time being of our so-called prestige schools, have three streams — academic, vocational and manual. Another is by having a panel of experts, including distinguished regional educators, advise on teacher and curriculum development; teacher-student interaction and the development and/or the selection of suitable text books.

The text books selected, the administration should not introduce, as happened a few years ago, politics into the process. Part of the panel’s function, until a comprehensive system of text book development and selection is worked out, should be to frustrate moves by any of the authors of text books in use today, or which will be in use in the future, to make very minor changes in their books, have them reprinted and claim that they were “revised” editions which made “earlier” editions out of date. I wish to make clear that what I have written should not be construed by anyone to mean that any such practice exists today or ever existed. Any development of the curriculum should take into account Trinidad and Tobago’s present natural progression to that of a developed country, or perhaps I should say a developed Member State of the Caribbean Community of Nations. Not only should the curriculum objectives of the panel be clearly defined, but in addition strategies should be worked out to include relevant programmes for teacher training to enable our educators to keep pace with new requirements of the profession. Research should be encouraged and rewarded.

All teachers, whether employed at primary or secondary schools, should be expected to obtain a minimum of a Bachelor’s Degree in Education by a cut off point, and within five years of the cut off point, a Master’s Degree in Education. They must be treated as professionals and their salaries at that stage should equate those awarded to public officers in other jobs requiring equivalent qualifications. Another point I wish to make is this. Emphasis should be placed on the establishment of Pre-School Child Development Centres. Already, Government in the last Budget announced the construction, over a period, of 200 Child Development Centres. But it must go further. Government should introduce a Head Start Programme for the children of low income families, under which they will access at no cost pre-school education at publicly funded Child Development Centres. The only requirement to qualify being a means test.

Under this Head Start Programme (which incidentally was introduced in the United States in 1967 by the Administration of late President Lyndon B Johnson) the pre-schoolers would be entitled to free nutritional breakfasts and lunches, as well as free medical, psychological and dental care. We have to seek to position our young children, and by extension the wider community, ultimately, to be able to face the challenges of the new day that is fast dawning.