This is an excerpt of a speech by Dr. Ralph Thompson at the Fourth Annual W.D. Carter Memorial Lecture held at the Northern Caribbean University on Tuesday.
THE TOPIC on which I am asked to speak is 'Positioning Education as Jamaica's Major Development Tool' and let me say at the outset that I see economic development as being only possible within a capitalist system, the one in which Mr. Carter operated so successfully. As Lester Thurow, in his book "The Future of Capitalism", says and I quote "since the onset of the industrial revolution - no economic system other than capitalism has been made to work anywhere.
Capitalism's 19th and 20th centuries competitors, fascism, socialism and communism, are all gone. No one knows how to run successful economies on any other principle".
Jamaica has been slow to learn this lesson and a socialist ideology still runs through the political bloodstream like a dormant infection. In education, over many years, this has resulted in a lowering of standards in the name of egalitarianism to the point where some primary schools were baptised as so called upgraded secondary schools, standard English is being beaten to death by patois in the name of nation building and the entrance requirements to Teachers Colleges are set as low as four CXCs at Grade III. No wonder then that Britain, as desperate as she is for teachers, does not recognise the diploma conferred by Jamaican Teachers Colleges.
MILLIONS OF DOLLARS
In fact, in England and America, the usual minimum qualification for teaching anywhere in the system is a Masters degree. The cost of remediation in the system by way of private tutoring and private tuition is running at millions of dollars and our universities, including this one I presume, are struggling to keep their academic heads above the flow of mediocrity which threatens to drown intellectual curiosity and to water down the scholarship.
Even when the danger signs began to emerge some years ago, a form of statistical legerdemain, a propaganda of sleight of hand, was used by officialdom to disguise how disastrous the CXC exam results really were. I believe that the purpose of a nation's education system is to educate to an acceptable level all children enrolled in the process.
For too long school principals have been allowed to pre-determine how many of the children in their school are likely to pass CXC and these pre-selected students are the only ones who can sit the exams. The number of CXC passes are then related to these 'entries', not to the total cohort of students, and this obviously makes the pass rate better than it really is
NOT ALLOWED TO
TAKE THE CXC ENGLISH
In 2003, by reason of pre-selection, 16,000 students were not allowed to take the CXC exam in English and some 20,000 were excluded from the maths exam, an average exclusion rate of about 50 per cent. Ask yourselves what happens to these youngsters? They are not 'drop outs'; they are the 'throw outs' which the system dumps on the landfill of society where gunmen are bred, the young boys holding their corners, the young girls holding their babies.
Eighty per cent of Jamaica's total secondary school population goes to non-traditional secondary schools and only 4.7 per cent of the cohort pass CXC Mathematics and only 9.2 per cent pass the CXC English exam. In terms of Jamaica's economic development, such results are disastrous. We now have a virtually illiterate workforce, on the one hand incapable of contributing to economic growth and, on the other, a terrible burden on the State, pushing up the cost to taxpayers of dealing with crime and violence. As Thurow has pointed out "teaching modern productive skills to those with a good basic education is simply much easier than teaching illiterate".
CANNOT ADD FRACTIONS OR READ A NEWSPAPER FLUENTLY
A recent column by Mark Wignall in The Observer makes interesting reading: in an informal survey of the artisan trades Wignall found that the majority cannot add fractions or read a newspaper fluently. Few electricians know anything about Ohm's law, refrigeration technicians cannot explain heat transfer and only a handful of masons knew how to calculate the square footage of a 12 x 9 foot wall. Farmers are incapable of reading the label instructions on how to mix insecticide.
We are at a cross roads in the crisis of education and we had better get on the right track before it is too late. But you may say to yourself - I am doing well at Northern Caribbean University, Jamaican teachers are being recruited abroad, a Jamaican scored the highest worldwide in the A level exams this year. Can things really be so bad?
Yes they can (and I am now quoting myself from a Gleaner article - one can't be too careful about plagiarism). Every system no matter how essentially disabled, throws up some glorious exceptions, Jamaicans who excel at home and abroad and in an understandable but misguided spirit of nationalism we continue to focus anecdotally on these few bright sons and daughters, refusing to confront the systemic problem, the reality of the illiterate and under-educated children of the poor.
The traditional secondary schools are doing reasonably well but they cater to only 20 per cent of our youngsters. No nation can survive with a performing 20 per cent being dragged down by a non-performing 80 per cent. And to make matters worse, there are some commentators who try to blame the successful 20 per cent for the failure of the 80 per cent. This is totally illogical and does not help to solve the problem. The Minister of Education has put up a balloon that perhaps by government decree children who do well in GSAT should be forced to go to non-traditional high schools while children who do poorly at GSAT should nevertheless be accepted into the top secondary schools. This is an example of the residual socialist tendency to level down instead of levelling up and would be a huge mistake. A Gleaner editorial asks the question: "Why are we pandering to such political expediency? The student with a high GSAT score will only be frustrated in his new environment and unchallenged to keep up his grades. The student with a poor GSAT score, forced into a school where competition is still, is very likely to have his already low self-esteem reinforced".
Which brings up a strange irony in the present system - one which results in the very elitism which socialism is supposed to find unacceptable. Because of the neglect of early childhood education, children flowing into Primary schools from Community Basic schools are not properly prepared while children flowing into the primary schools from church prep schools and properly run infant schools can absorb the learning process and develop their analytic skills.
CHILDREN SCORE BADLY
It is no wonder then that when both groups take the same GSAT exam, the Community Basic school children score badly and the others score well. Based on this, the youngsters who score badly are sent to non-traditional secondary schools which only reinforces their mediocrity as evidenced by the disastrous results at the CXC level.
Unless something is done about early childhood education, elitism will continue to be fostered by the system. On the other hand if the State takes over early childhood education and improves standards at this important formative stage in a child's life, the total stream of children flowing into primary schools will be at a satisfactory level which will ensure that the CXC results are better balanced across the board. The system will have been levelled up instead of being levelled down.
But to improve early childhood education across the board means that the quality of teachers generally needs to be improved and our best teachers, with special training in the skills needed to teach young children, should be recruited for the early childhood sector of the education chain.
TOTALLY WRONG
Many Jamaicans think that children between the ages of one and six years old need only a child minder or a granny to take care of them. Real education starts when they are bigger. This is totally wrong. It is a scientific fact that children between the ages of one and six learn more than they will for the rest of their lives.
At present, most teachers in the community basic schools, some 1800 of them in which 90 per cent of our youngsters are enrolled, are untrained and paid little more than domestic helpers. The entry requirements for the teachers colleges need to be raised from four or five CXC subjects of which English must be a minimum of Grade II.
STANDARD ENGLISH
It is in early childhood education that children who speak patois must be taught to cross the bridge into standard English but this can't be done if the teachers themselves, even graduates of the Teacher Training colleges, can't speak standard English. Government insists that bars and restaurants be licensed but there are no such requirement for teachers. This must change. Teachers should be licensed for three year intervals, required to take ongoing training and paid based on performance.
In the old days, early childhood education could be left to parents but the reality today is that the nuclear family is fast disappearing from Jamaican society. Children in inner city communities and the deep rural areas are being, not brought up but brought down in shameful environments, sometimes eight to a room, four to a bed, exposed to early sexual stimulation, noise, domestic violence, malnutrition and poor hygienic conditions.
Unless the State takes over the parenting role for the children of the poor they will continue to fail GSAT in primary school. Our teachers, poorly trained as they are, may well be doing their best with what they are given but this may not be enough and is certainly not solving the problem. Explanations should not be allowed to become excuses.
INDISCIPLINE AND CONFUSION
The Jamaican education system is faced with indiscipline and confusion and with the advent of the Caribbean Single Market we need urgently to assess how our educational institutions tack up against our Caribbean neighbours.
It is comforting to talk about creating our own standards, to dismiss CXC results as not really that important, but I am here to tell you that objective benchmarks are the way of the real world into which every university graduate will be thrown, there to sink or swim.
Professor Ronald Young, of that other university in Kingston, has analysed the 2002 CXC results to show that we are suffering from an education deficit of some 50 per cent compared with the trend in Barbados, Trinidad and Guyana. He points out that the two countries with the worst economies, Jamaica and Guyana, are those which come out worst in his analysis.
The connection between education and economic development is obvious. This point was made during the recent national debate on Education in which I took part when it was emphasised that wealth creation no longer depends principally on natural resources and cheap labour but rather on knowledge and technology harnessed under the lordship of the creative imagination, that wonderful faculty which shuttles between intellect and will to produce a balance we call wisdom.
It is only when the creative imaginations of our children are stimulated in early childhood that tertiary institutions like Northern Caribbean University can build on this foundation and craft the icing on the cake. In today's competitive world we are often judged by the icing but icing without the cake is froth and may not be cost effective. We can no longer afford to support a flow of mediocrity into the tertiary system in the hope that by natural selection a relatively small proportion of brilliant scholars will be produced.
EDUCATE FOR QUALITY,
NOT FOR QUANTITY
We must educate for quality, not for quantity. I know of no philosophic basis on which the citizens of a country can claim that everyone who wants to go to university has a 'right' to do so.
In the Third World we are quick to invent rights, forgetting that every right throws up a corresponding duty and if the process of getting a university education is not cost effective, if it ends up producing more mediocrity than excellence, it is simply not fair to call upon taxpayers to carry such an artificial burden for ideological reasons.
The determining factor should be, not numbers, but the capacity of applicants, rich or poor, to benefit fully from tertiary education. No person with such potential should be obliged to forego a university education because he or she is too poor to pay for it.
On the other hand, mere time servers who just want a degree for the sake of a degree should not have their tuition subsidised. This balance can be achieved through scholarships and by expanding student loans with less stringent conditionalities.
