All children need national recognition

Youth education isn’t a sports competition. It’s, among other things, a system for promoting national cohesion, national inclusion, national confidence in children, the future of the nation. They all represent team TT .

Children’s success starts with parents and caregivers and, yes, national leaders who have positive future hopes for children and demonstration that attitude in words and deeds.

Confidence backed with support is the game breaker between successful children and unsuccessful.

Similarly, confidence backed with support is key in commercial enterprises.

Every year the media interview top exam-scoring SE A, CSE C and CAPE children. National leaders shower praise on a handful of those students. They never seek to interview middle performers or low performers or under-performers.

So the nation never hears about the challenges, fears, emotional turmoil of these, the majority of children.

That discrimination helps the education system to cover up its many flaws.

And so, nothing out of the ordinary is done to raise the quality of less desired schools. And nothing out of the ordinary is done to turn inhospitable schools into learning institutions exuding high education standards.

The low-standard, backward secondary schools of the 1980s and 1990s continue in their infamous fame in the 2010s. Billions of dollars in public expenditure have not upgraded the performance standards of those schools. Under-resourced primary schools of yesteryear still wrestle with not enough in 2017 and are dimly judged in spite of their obvious handicap.

B JOSEPH via email