Peter Espeut

After my column last week where I reminded that out of the roughly 260 working days in the year, there are only 190 school days, someone pointed out to me that some teachers object to using any of their 70 vacation days to mark test papers. End-of-year exams are held three weeks or so before the end of the school year; the children then idle or go on class trips while their teachers grade exams and fill out reports. Many students get even less teaching than we are led to believe. Five extra days will be lost in this system!

Reading problem

Last week I showed that the public primary school system is failing because after 45 years of Indepen-dence we can't teach half of our children to read. This week I want to examine our secondary system. The first point that must be made is that it never has been government policy for all Jamaican schoolchildren to get a full secondary education, i.e. up to Grade 11. In the colonial period the norm was an 'Elementary School' education (Grades 1-9); after Independence the norm was unchanged, but elementary schools were all renamed 'All-Age Schools';the same (Grades 1-9). In the last few years the government has renamed some of them as 'Primary and Junior High', same Grades 1-9. Clearly, if you are not teaching your primary students how to read, it is irrational to send them to secondary school, and so all-age schools and junior high schools are there to keep the children until they are 15 years old. These remain the largest single category of school providing education at the secondary level, the modal type of secondary education in modern Jamaica.

If you believe that humans are rational (as I do) then in trying to understand history you search for the rationality. What is the rationality in having large numbers of Jamaicans, mostly in rural areas, not being able to read and write, and not getting the sort of high school education which would allow social mobility?

Jamaica's society

The answer is quite simple: Jamaica was/is a plantation society, requiring a large number of (male) manual labourers. That was the purpose of the slave trade. That is why persons from India and China were first brought here. The planters who ruled Jamaica designed an education system which would not affect their labour supply. They supported schools to train the supervisors, managers and bookkeepers they needed, but they did not support any effort to producewidespread literacy or quality secondary education.

Before 1960 no government high schools existed. High schools were for the elite; to attend you either had to pay fees or have a scholarship. The plantation interests and churches which began high schools did so in a way that did not challenge the system.

And so where were high schools located before 1960? Not anywhere near a sugar or banana area. The big sugar parish of Trelawny never had one (Westwood was for girls only); the big banana parish of St. Mary never had one (Marymount was for girls only); the sugar parish of St. Thomas never had one; the sugar plains of Vere never had one. High schools were placed in Kingston and Mandeville and Malvern which had no sugar estates.

In my view the rationale for education in Jamaica has not changed in 150 years. Our system remains elitist, with a sound high school education being reserved for only a few. After Independence, when we had a chance to build dozens of high schools to broaden the franchise, we chose to build some seventy 'Junior Secondary Schools' (Grades 7-10); to get in you had to FAIL the Common Entrance Examination. In 1962 we had 41 high schools; 25 years later in 1987 we had only 44! Both the PNP and JLP have failed the children and people of this country. They have simply continued the education policies of our former slave masters. More next week.