DAWN RITCH
NOW COMES the deeply dismal news from the Ministry of Education. Barely over half of the 10-year-olds now in school have mastered word recognition, reading and comprehension. Only a little over half are literate, the Government's standardised test has revealed. Contacted by this newspaper on the report, Education Minister Maxine Henry-Wilson described the results as 'disturbing'. That must be the understatement of the year.
The results also show that 23.9 per cent of school children are 'near mastery' of literacy, and 18.4 per cent are at the 'non-mastery' level. She said she was making attempts to deal with the standards of performance. That remains to be seen. I wonder if the minister realises that there is no alternative to acquiring literacy except through reading a book. The computer is hopeless at the task. The technological age is of no more developmental significance than the invention of the motor car or the railway, and probably a great deal less.
These things don't drive themselves. A human being has to do that. Technology is not and can never be the panacea for illiteracy and ignorance. Indeed it proves quite the contrary in all too many cases. Every time I see computers being delivered to schools, I wince. Eight and nine-year-olds are battling with penmanship, yet corporate Jamaica is proudly giving them computers. This seems to me a grand gesture of useless sabotage. Books and teachers are the only known remedy for illiteracy.
On the one hand, the Conference Board reports that young people say there are no good jobs, and on the other corporate Jamaica says young people are not 'job ready'. They lack fluency in reading, intelligible speech and can't think logically. A range of social and knowledge skills are missing. The biggest national budget and all the finest technology in the world can't solve this problem.
ZONED-OUT ZOMBIES
Computers threaten to turn children into zoned-out zombies going round and round in circles, without a guiding hand. Worldwide, governments are making computers the new opiate of the masses, rather than going to the bother and effort of teaching children properly. Instead authorities promise knowledge at the click of a mouse. Another click and you learn pronunciation and grammar. A herd mentality takes over, and that is the last thing democracy needs.
The Sunday Times reported on September 12, 2004 that in England last August, a third of the Confederation of British Industry members have had to pay for extra English and math lessons for recruits aged 16-19. Nearly half of all British universities are forced to put on remedial classes in English and maths for first-year students, because so many do not possess the literacy and numerical skills expected of undergraduates. A survey of six to 14-year-olds in the United Kingdom found that 65 per cent could not name one classical composer. And so it goes on.
Here in Jamaica there are remedial classes at the University of the West Indies. Once upon a time students who needed remedial classes could NOT have qualified for entry into a university. Now they padlock the gates demanding the right not only to remedial classes in university, but to pay for them on their own terms and conditions, or not at all perhaps. In their case the 20 per cent of the cost that they are required to bear is regarded by them as not only a gross inconvenience, but an intolerable injustice. The 600 student demonstrators said they were protesting not only on their own behalf, but on behalf of another 3,000 students in the same predicament and feeling the same way. Subsidised by Government, UWI students feel entitled to public sympathy because they're not inclined to pay 20 per cent when due. No doubt their parents join them in this.
DECENT STANDARD OF EDUCATION
The only right a person has to education is his or her own obligation to pay attention and pick up a book. Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University in the U.K., writes that primary schools there struggling to maintain a decent standard of education are denounced for "putting children under pressure" and being "too competitive". It is not uncommon, he states, to find children as young as five or six described as "not academic" by adults who seem keen to lower these youngsters' ambitions. Sadly, he says, all too many schools accommodate this sentiment. Professor Furedi states that many academics are therefore struck by the general lack of knowledge and feeble grasp of history of the current generation of British undergraduates. All he needed to add was that they also demand to be spoken to only in soothing tones, so that their minds will not be troubled and their self-esteem imperilled.
I believe that technology, computer labs, language labs and music rooms are at best only an aid. Indispensable are teachers who can teach, books and scores that make sense, and students who can read. Nobody will ever invent a substitute because there is no alternative. Not unless you are gifted beyond words and can teach yourself anything even at the age of three. There are only a few of these children on the planet at any one time. For the vast majority of the human kind literacy is not natural. It has to be learned.
The education minister concluded that the Jamaican problem is caused by an inadequate number of 'specialist teachers' to direct and address remedial needs from as early as grade one. Grade one is for five to six-year-olds, so I don't understand why a 'specialist teacher' is needed to do what teachers have always done with children that age for the past 2,000 years. Mrs. Henry-Wilson also says that they're putting in place in schools a 'new curriculum' and 'new support materials' to combat the problem. Not a word about books in good condition or poor, nor teachers who know their subject and can teach it. English and maths are not new. They will just continue to be overlooked here, there, and everywhere, while everybody complains about a decline in discipline and a rise in poverty.
