Martin Henry

THE CLAMOUR of crime and violence and of local government elections, and the intertwining of both, have drowned out many other voices. Timing is critical in communication, and Rhodes Scholar Ronald Thwaites, Member of Parliament (MP) for Central Kingston, may just have picked a very bad time to table his private member's bill in Parliament. But, almost no time is a good time for a private member's bill in our Parliament. These bills are rare and they rarely survive.

Thwaites wants Parliament to amend the Education Act. And he wants the act and all related regulations and codes to ensure that mastery is achieved in each grade before a student is promoted to the next grade. "There is absolutely no justification," the advocate argues, "for promoting a student in school to a higher grade when they have failed to achieve the standards of the previous grade." Actually, there are powerful reasons, if not exactly a justification.

Ugly picture

The MP wants Parlia-ment to adopt the principle that "we do not advance a person in school unless the rudiments of the grade they are in have been satisfied."

From the bowels of central Kingston, Ronnie would have a firsthand view of the results of educational failure. Nationally, the picture is not pretty. At the primary level, the National Assessment Programme, which tests students at several grade levels, is signalling disaster. Students are failing in the 3Rs basics of reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic.

Edward Seaga, who established the HEART Trust, shocked us in his column on Sunday when he indicated that 75 per cent of young Jamaicans left secondary education with no examination passes. The 25-year-old Trust was instituted initially as a second-chance agency for school leavers who hadn't made it in secondary education and is continuing, ad infinitum, partly as such.

Remediation is massive all through the education system, all the way to the graduate level at university.

An important matter

So Thwaites' solution is an important matter with significant economic and social weight. There are enormous costs and consequences. But, at least one parliamen-tarian has quickly declared the motion "foolishness".

At the turn of the 20th century, long before Ronnie came up for trite ridicule, Ellen G. White, who had little formal education herself, wrote a towering monograph simply called Education, a book which students are required to read at Northern Caribbean University. In it she advocated that, "But before taking up the higher branches of study, let them (students) master the lower. This is too often neglected. Even among students in the higher schools and colleges there is great deficiency in knowledge of the common branches of education. A thorough knowledge of the essentials of education should be not only the condition of admission to a higher course, but the constant test for continuance and advancement."

Two important concepts are taught in proposal writing: cost-benefit analysis, and feasibility. Should Thwaites' proposal be adopted the cost-benefit would be positive and high. Unfortunately, the feasibility of the proposal is low for other reasons, 'political' reasons.

Ronnie sees his proposal ensuring that schools do not continue to be mere assembly lines. But that is exactly what the modern school system has been designed to be. And, it is intended to be a sorting line as well, from the rejects to the A graders. If that principle holds and the line is held up, huge chaos will be the result.

To compound the problem, the politics of education, which determines salary and status, has ensured that teaching can attract, in the main, only the weakest of the achievers from the same school system - thus perpetuating a vicious cycle of under-achievement.

Since politics is the art of the possible, a pragmatic half-way solution is to provide better resources, both material and human, at the base to ensure a better start and lower losses through the system.