Fix education, fix crime

Speaking at the launch of a mentoring programme involving Servol, the Central Bank and the National Entrepreneurship Development Company Ltd (Nedco), Fr Pantin lamented that "no one is making the link between education and violence." However, this is not quite true. Most persons have agreed that, in the long-term, education holds the key to transforming Trinidad and Tobago into a better state, and the Ministry of Education has been promoting its "Culture of Peace" programme for over two years now. Education Minister Hazel Manning only weeks ago pointed to a decline in the number of suspended students as evidence that the programme was working.

However, such programmes and, indeed, schooling in general, do not touch those young persons who most need it — the killers and bandits and sociopaths who are causing havoc throughout the country.

So the education system can indeed be linked to increasing violence. If the system catered for the young persons who are most at risk, they would not turn to criminal activities for survival and status. Unfortunately, the system does not provide them with adequate skills to make their way in the legitimate world, nor does it serve to make them feel that they belong to the wider society.

How can this be done? It is an established fact that many criminals have cognitive problems. So their failure in school, which is a key factor in them becoming criminals, often has nothing to do with their innate intelligence, but is a consequence of learning difficulties related to hearing, seeing, and reading.

It is therefore crucial that the Government set up an early childhood programme to detect and cater for children who have such problems.

The teaching system must also be changed, especially at primary school level, to embrace the different learning styles of children.

Not all children are good at linguistic and logical learning, but these are the only two styles our system caters for. Additionally, children stop thinking of learning as fun when they leave kindergarten, whereas the most successful schools internationally are those which have made innovations so that children actually enjoy learning and, as a result, learn better. They also begin to feel part of the social system that they were born into.

When, however, students leave school with over 40 percent of them having failed, as happens here, then a significant portion of that 40 percent see themselves as failures for life and feel alienated from the society. And, of those who succeed, few will become life-long learners — which should be the ultimate goal of any education system.

The Education Ministry has been tinkering with the system, putting in a programme here and a curriculum change there, but the final goal must be a complete overhaul.

This is not merely because the education system has been failing to meet the country’s needs for at least three decades now, but also because the economic and social demands of the 21st century are going to be significantly different from what obtained before. Our system, which is barely out of the 19th century, therefore has to be fundamentally reformed if we are to meet future challenges and become a developed nation.