By Dr. Ralph Thompson, Contributor 
Thompson
The following is an edited version of a speech given by Dr. Ralph Thompson to mark the 30th anniversary of the Kingston Bookshop at the Terra Nova Hotel on May 5, 2004.
AS JAMAICA is such a fragmented society, culturally and economically, the mission of teachers is made all the more onerous.
We are perhaps the most fragmented nation in the world given our past and present geographical divisions currently 2.5 million of us on the rock and 2.5 million scattered in the diaspora, each segment with different priorities, values and economic opportunities.
On the domestic scene, the country is divided between haves and have-nots, uptown versus downtown, racial tension between blacks, browns and whites; a sophisticated, well-travelled middle class versus a blinkered, complaisant proletariat.
GOD-FEARERS AND MURDERERS
We are divided between God-fearers and murderers, between joie de vivre and sexual debaucheries. There are those who work hard and are honest and there are those who are drones always looking for a "bly".
This social fragmentation is a curse which has infected the education system so we are now divided between traditional secondary schools and non-traditional secondary schools, on the one hand private prep schools and, on the other, so-called community basic schools which are unregulated, many run by Miss Mattie on her verandah, some still with pit latrines, many with no insurance, no electricity and a cadre of untrained teachers paid little more than domestic helpers. And this is the year of Our Lord 2004.
Another type of fragmentation is between the formal education system taken as a whole and the remediation education system which is now a multi-million dollar industry. You don't need a remedy unless there is a disease.
So the fact that so many middle-class children have to pay for private tuition and so many working-class persons attend remedial classes to get the CXCs which they failed when in school, shows how sick the formal system has become.
Then my friend and sparring partner, Dr. Carolyn Cooper, instigates another fragmentation, that between patois and Standard English. Of course, she argues that we can achieve ubiquity by having everybody speak patois. She once told me on the Breakfast Club that when a Jamaican Prime Minister goes to Washington to beg for money he should speak patois only and oblige Washington to provide a translator as it would do for a Japanese Prime Minister.
These are ideological arguments that sound good but defy common sense. Jamaica has to survive in a global economy and to do so its citizens must speak Standard English, not reluctantly as an artificial second language but enthusiastically as one of the benefits inherited from our colonial past...like the railroad which we destroyed and English common law which we want to use for social engineering.
EARLY CHILDHOOD
No one denies that in the early childhood system teachers need to bridge the gap between patois and Standard English but to be able to do so, graduates of our teachers colleges need to be comfortably at home with Standard English themselves. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. The main problem with the Cooper doctrine is that it subconsciously undermines the urgency of international communication, sometimes damning it with faint praise and sending the wrong message to those looking for an excuse for poor scholastic performance.
At the most subtle level, there is an epistemological dichotomy which emerges from the education debate. In the early childhood stage, one school of thought hears the word education to mean exclusively reading and writing, while another set of specialists think that emphasis should be on development creating the desire to read and write.
In fact, both schools share an undivided moiety in the process, whether we call it education or development. But we can only speak lineally, one concept at a time. Short of inventing a name for both, "Dev-ed" or "Ed-dev", there is danger of each side trying too hard to protect its territory.
Confronted by the fault lines in our social geography, politicians attempt to cover them over by creating yet another committee to bridge the gap. Hence the current task force on Education set up by the Prime Minister, another duplication of time, energy and resources.
In breach of a solemn Parliamentary undertaking, this year's national budget allocates only nine per cent for education instead of 10 per cent as agreed between Government and Opposition and only 4.5 per cent of this is for early childhood education, the foundation of the entire system. This educational fragmentation is largely the cause of the appalling results at the CXC level, both in terms of actual passes and in comparison with our Caribbean neighbours. Some 25,000 kids each year are either not allowed to take CXC or fail. This, rather than the enrolment figures, is the measure of our failure to educate our children. This is the stark statistic which we can now use to predict how many gunmen and baby mothers will emerge each year.
As one school principal recently remarked, we are doing at the primary level what should be done at the early childhood level and we are doing at the secondary level what should be done at the primary level and we are generally having to do at the tertiary level what we could be doing at the secondary level. So we are always playing catch up. With the usual exception which nature throws up in any course of endeavour, a tertiary education today is about the equivalent of a good secondary school education when I went to St. George's College. And this is giving tertiary education the benefit of the comparison.
UNITY IN EDUCATION
The opposite of fragmentation is unity and I submit that in our search for equity for education we must start with early childhood, that period between two and seven when a child will learn more, for good or bad, than it will for the rest of its life. This is a proven scientific fact but one not easily accepted by a folk society which still thinks that little children only need a granny or a nanny.
Early childhood is when we must reinforce the common humanity of every child before the pressures of fragmentation begin to open cracks in its psyche.
There was a time when the family helped to perform this task but family life is fast disappearing in Jamaica. Even as we try to preserve it, even as we try to get parents involved, we must demand that the state play a more active role in this segment of the education cycle. But the state has to rely on teachers to do its work and in order to ensure transparency and accountability in the profession, teachers should be licensed.
We license doctors and lawyers, even real estate salesmen and electricians. Why should teachers, entrusted with the delicate task of moulding the characters of our children and the enlightenment of their minds, be an exception?
By concentrating on early childhood education, by creating a core of truly professional teachers, we can, in one generation, remove the inequities that now plague the system and exacerbate its fragmentation.
Early childhood education is the best stage at which to bridge the gap between patois and Standard English so that when our children enter primary school they will do so on an equal footing which in turn will give each child a fighting chance to do well at GSAT.
HANDICAPPED KIDS
Once results at GSAT are more uniform (having been levelled up across the board rather than down) the temptation to send bright kids to traditional secondary schools and handicapped kids, mostly children of the poor, to non-traditional secondary schools, will have been removed and elitism in the system eliminated at last.
We can bemoan our fragmented society, argue as to what is to be blamed for it, but as Derek Walcott has said in his Nobel lecture "Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole," this can be our epiphany. And in accepting the challenge of restructuring the education vase I urge you as teachers not to fall personal victims to a fragmentation of your own the gap between the prick of conscience and the comfort of inertia.
Change is difficult to embrace at any time but if deep down in your hearts you know what is necessary to improve the education system, please do not feel so comfortable with your present status that you sit back and do nothing.
Unless you as members of the JTA have the moral courage to embrace change, nothing will happen.
I plead with you to put the national interest above self-interest. Like me as a young man, don't let a burnt cork moustache camouflage the need for maturity in dealing with the Kantian concept of "oughtness" in education.
I have no power base. I am almost a lone voice crying in the wilderness. It is easy for politicians to ignore me as a mere irritant. But they can't ignore you. You have the power for change. I pray you use it wisely.