Edward Seaga, Contributor"Stepping up eena life" has been a catchy expression of inner-city youth in recent times which summed up an expectation to fill a void of hope. Understandably, it made its debut from the streets to prominence through the lotto ads.
Focusing on the future is of particular importance to young people as they approach the year in which they are to sit their graduation exam. It is the period when thought is given to how to 'step up eena life'. Girls are more focused at that time because they can justifiably have more hopeful expectations since, undoubtedly, they studied harder than boys. But there are more desirable career options for them: teaching, nursing, clerical, telephone operators and information technology, tourism, among other white collar skills.
Boys lack sufficient options in these middle-level skills. They must either aim high: medicine, law, architecture, engineering, etc., or aim low to the blue collar and labouring categories: motor mechanics, woodwork, construction, agriculture or security guards.
The brighter prospects for girls are greater incentives for study. Boys who can't get desirable white-collar jobs, often prefer to try their luck in the 'open market' for hustling, delivery men, construction work, or in the more lucrative areas of entertainment, drugs or crime.
The way forward to 'step up eena life' is more uncertain for boys than girls and has a bearing on the perspective of how boys view the prospects of drugs and crime as good income earners instead of seeking higher education.
The solution, however, is not only how to raise the performance of boys, but how to improve the education of boys and girls bearing in mind the incredible block of failed youth - boys and girls - who leave school every year without any skill for work. This leaves many of them open to becoming "careless gal and wu'tless bwoy", or teenage mothers and corner criminals. The solution must be to improve the performance of all whose prospects are failure.
Let me explain how bad the situation is by way of illustration of a diagrammatic tree. Take the age cohort of 51,520 babies born in 1989. In 2005, at age 16 years, they sat the CXC graduation exam. See the survival chart below which shows the learning outcome.
At the end of the line, age 16, when the CXC graduation exam is taken, only 7,600 of the original 51,520 in the age cohort passed, that is, 15 per cent of the original number. Hence, 85 per cent fail to make it after dropping out of the education system - not being enrolled in any secondary school, or lack of academic ability.
Shocking results
Can any country develop with 15 per cent of its youth while much of the remaining 85 per cent goes to waste? These shocking results underlie the urgency for an educational system which can reverse the figures - providing 85 per cent performers and 15 per cent non-performers.
The 85 per cent or 43,400 non-performers are from poor households where great sacrifices are made to send children to school in the expectation that they will emerge from the process with skills to establish a career which can be of help to parents in their golden years.
According to the report of the task force on educational reform, the cost to these poor households of this failed process is $42,000 per student per annum. Poor people pay $19 million to send each age group of students to school, or $190 million over the 10-year career period of primary and secondary schools.
By comparison, government spends $30,000 per student per annum, which is significantly less than households. The task force report recommends a considerable increase in government expenditure on education, amounting to $520 billion over 10 years, or $52 billion per annum.
An interesting study published in the Economics Bulletin, February, 2006, by Brian Francis and Sunday Iyare of the Department of Economics, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus, is revealing on this point. The study was carried out on data available for Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, covering the 35-year- period 1969-1998. The conclusion is derived from comparing expenditure per capita on education with gross national income per capita, which is used as a proxy by the World Bank for economic development.
More expenditure
The central theme of these findings is that more expenditure on education by itself is not stimulating national economic development. The curriculum needs greater relevance in providing skills to equip graduates for jobs. Also, the economy requires more focus on job development which relates to available skills. Simply spending more money on education at the parental or national levels will not appropriately educate school leavers to make themselves or the national economy grow.
This analysis calls for four related sets of action, none of which are expensive investments, and all of which are specific solutions, required to lift educational levels:
An overall manpower survey to determine the shortfall in supply and demand of various skills is essential. At every level, the training system is operating in the dark, often training too many or too few students in particular skills. This includes tertiary-level education to guide colleges and universities so that they do not continue to produce graduates who walk the pavement for months after graduation or have to take jobs below their level of training in order to earn some sort of living. And all this occurs while repayments by graduates on their student loans are running.The last manpower survey was done by the PSOJ in the late 1980s. I commissioned the survey to guide us in job creation. The economy responded with a record level of job creation, nearly 100,000 in three years.
A curriculum review is long overdue. I am not referring to a fine-tuning revision of the present curriculum. I am referring to a fundamental revision to ensure more job-related training as Francis and Iyare recommend. It makes no sense to be offering yesterday's curriculum to provide for the needs of today's society in today's world. Employers would be far more interested in employees with the benefits of a skilled graduate who can operate within the core of the society in which they live. No amount of improved training can benefit students who are unable to properly understand the academic courses currently offered. No student can benefit from teaching without an effective homework programme. Students from the new secondary schools, inner city and rural, have great difficulty in doing homework properly. In some cases, the home environment is too noisy and crowded. In other cases, travel time leaves the student with inadequate time to do the job. The successful students are the few who make enormous efforts to overcome the odds. An education system should be geared to produce reasonable success even from mediocre students.To implement this, a one-hour time session should be programmed as an additional period at the end of the school day when students would do homework under the supervision of a staff member. A small stipend could be offered to teachers. Another option is to adjust the curriculum to designate the last class period of the day to be homework hour. This would require adjustments to the regular curriculum.
The programme at HEART must be reviewed to fit into the specific designated areas of training required. HEART has been veering from its designated mission. I will say more on this soon when I keep a speaking engagement with HEART.In the 1980s, I launched the Solidarity programme and the Self-Start Fund to provide funds for mini-projects suitable for recent graduates who had been processed at school as being capable of operating mini-projects and had been given basic training to do so.
Solidarity did not seek any security or collateral from borrowers but each borrower was required to name a member of the business community who would agree to be their mentor, especially in overseeing whether they were operating on business lines and satisfactorily maintaining their bank accounts.
The funds would come from the Self-Start Fund, which I believe is still in operation. The record of performance under Dr. Joyce Robinson, with the support of my wife, Carla, who conceived the Solidarity scheme, was satisfactory because of close monitoring. Arrears in repayment of loans were only 25 per cent.
Valuable lessons
Solidarity became an entrepreneurship training ground which had many other valuable lessons to teach: awareness of the market system economy versus the socialist hand-out system, as well as a better understanding of customer relationships which would broaden social-interaction skills with productive people.
In the meantime, I detect a growing trend to condemn poor, inner-city and rural youth who made the wrong choices in lifestyle and careers because of lack of correct options and appropriate training. This criticism by middle-class people whose credentials are lacking in first-hand experience with these young people and whose disposition to young people who can't and don't conform is to ignore them, isolate them, reject them or eliminate them, because they can't conform to the social middle ground, is grounded in either ill-will or ignorance.
These rejects are the same body of unlearned youth from which ranks has come the greatest promotion and branding of Jamaica throughout the world, through reggae music. Anywhere in the world, including Mongolia, Jamaica is well known for reggae and Bob Marley who himself came directly from a condemned area. These same youths have greater credit to their achievements in music and sports in building a better Jamaica than any other social or economic group in the country. The fact that a minority among them are destructive must not condemn all others whose reason for non-achievement is that the ladder which society provides for them is too short to scale the walls of prejudice and neglect which keeps them from expanding the use of their creative and productive talents.
If they are given the chance, they too will 'step up eena life'.
Edward Seaga is a former Prime Minister. He is now a Distinguished Fellow at the UWI. Email: odf@uwimona.edu.jm.
Survival chart of age cohort over 18-year-period (1987-2005)
51,520 (100%) annual births of which 14,400 (28%) dropped out or never entered any secondary school (attended all-age schools). Balance - 37,094 (72%) eligible to sit CXC exam of which 19,578 (38%) not entered to sit CXC exam because of weak academic ability. Balance - 17,516 (34%) sat CXC exam of which 9,788 (19%) failed CXC exam, that is, no pass. Balance - 7,728 (15%) passed CXC examSource: Ministry of Education
