Have slow learners back in school during vacation

This year’s continued falling away in the percentage of students attaining full certificates in the O Level examinations should be viewed not as an indictment of the students and condemned as an apparent unwillingness to optimise educational opportunities offered them, but rather as a weakness of the education system itself.

There are several negative contributory factors that need to be addressed, although their addressing may be uncomfortable both to teachers and school children. We have to disabuse our minds of the long held belief that all students once they are provided with the opportunity to learn, with the opportunity to enter secondary school, and "promoted" year after year should be able to do well. The harsh reality is that students (or you may wish to call them pupils) not only can they not all move ahead at the same pace, but that many lag behind because they cannot cope with a largely academic education or vocational education.

Instead, slow movers and thinkers should be provided a chance at a third level or stream, that of manual education. To lump children of secondary school age all together or in the academic or vocational streams and expect them to somehow fit in, for example in schools where an academic type education dominates is an unthinking absurdity.

The slow learners may resent the ability of decidedly better than average students in their classes both to grasp quickly what is being taught, while they, the slow learners, fall behind. Not only will they resent this but may show their resentment in a physical way or in tactics aimed at disrupting their classes. Some are all too often are unable to deal with what has been described as "conventional written examinations" or for that matter with oral questions posed by their teachers.

Sadly, there are many teachers who incorrectly and tactlessly describe them as "duncey" and seek to parade them as such and unfeelingly, hold them up to the ridicule of their peers. There is an externally induced loss of self esteem, and the luckless students can become increasingly insecure and, in the process, hostile to their teachers, the student achievers and to education itself.

The solution should not be seen in such narrow terms as separating them or herding them into strongly academic or vocational schools which may encourage feelings of being less than others, but in having them in the same schools with different streams — academic, vocational and manual.

Preparing them for the job and/or skills market, as Education Minister, Senator Hazel Manning has been stressing and pressing for within recent years, at the pre-school level, with the construction and adequate staffing of early childhood care centres across the country. But there must be the accompanying strategy as well of seeking to persuade parents to become members of pre-school Parent-Teacher Associa-tions.

A parallel strategy should be the contracting of educationally deprived parents back to the classroom through adult education classes and an effective marketing of the benefits of this facility.

There has to be a rethink of the manner in which Trinidad and Tobago deals with the question of school vacations. New rules and regulations should be introduced which would be an obligatory three or four-week annual vacation period for teachers. Obligatory to the State, that is. Within this framework school children who have not performed well during the school year will be required to return to school during the July-August vacation, and their teachers required to come in and assist them in seeking to improve their grades. This should not be viewed as a form of punishment, but rather as a desired tactic to afford the affected school children the opportunity to catch up and, in the process, move forward.

The nation will need to adopt methods which may appear revolutionary or even harsh, if it is to move forward in the demanding age of globalisation. In addition, students, who have done well but who, nonetheless, wish to upgrade their efficiency should also be in a position to access addition tuition. The around the corner end of preferential entry of sugar and bananas to the European Union, and the challenges being thrown out in our own market place by cheaply produced goods say from China, which will soon have literally free entry to Trinidad and Tobago and Caricom call for entirely new thinking and approach.

Trinidad and Tobago is entering a new phase, admittedly, not quite fully, in which the country’s goods will no longer enjoy preferential entry to our supermarket, hardware and haberdashery shelves.

We need to redefine training, indeed our entire approach to education. An educated population with an increasing ability to adapt itself to changes in demands for skills to make our goods and services move competitive is demanded urgently.

The after effects of slavery, indentureship and colonialism have seen all too many of us tarry too long, idling instead of toiling in the vineyard. Globalisation demands that we must create opportunities for ourselves through accelerated and needed changes in education including our across the board approach to education. If we fail, and trying hard we will not, then long before our crude and natural gas reserves run out, many of our young citizens will face a bleak future as proverbial hewers of wood and drawers of water.