The Editor, Sir:

I read with interest all the controversy and the tears, real and the alligator variety, about education in Jamaica today. I read with interest the fact that we have to turn our schools into fortresses that still cannot provide a safe haven for students and teachers. And I realise that we stopped educating and have substituted exam passing.

Very few are really interested in learning any new information and/or skills. What is important is acquiring a piece of paper that says you have successfully passed an exam. This does not mean that the student really knows anything and that he or she can think and analyse information, it simply means that he or she has swotted a book or notes and, like any good parrot, can now regurgitate the material.

The student can answer questions, if they have appeared on a paper before, and are phrased exactly the same. Hence the need to try and buy, steal or burrow previous question papers, so that they or as much of them as possible can be committed to memory. There is also the need to beg borrow or buy A-grade composition answers that can be memorised and spewed back if the question is vaguely the same. However, if the question has been rephrased, or the composition answer requires a different view point, then the student cannot answer the question. This is the focus and this is all there is in today's education scenario. This is the primary reason we have to have exam security that practically amounts to a strip search.

Soft skills not taught

Soft skills, the skills that differentiate us from the worst of the animal kingdom, are no longer taught; there is no time. And we are surprised that we reap the whirlwind - tertiary institutions where rape is a problem and where students perpetrate fraud against each other. We are surprised when with more graduates including doctorates in our history we have no new ideas, and certainly no concerns about our brothers and sisters and our country.

You see we are so focused on the murder and mayhem that is our current reality, that we fail to realise that to move forward we have to go back. Back to the true meaning of education - the training of the whole person, so that they can and will feel obliged to contribute, rather than plunder the society in which they live and draw their being.

I am, etc.,

JEAN FORBES (Mrs.)

jean_forbes@yahoo.com

59 Norbrook Drive, Kingston 8

Via Go-Jamaica