Ronald Thwaites | Have a HEART

I thought of Wayne as Parliament formalised the merger between the HEART/NTA, the Youth Service and JFLL/JAMAL this past week. From an inner-city community, he actually went to one of the better primary schools and had a smattering of secondary exposure in one of the then ‘senior’ schools. Because his literacy in English was limited and numeracy even worse, he was among the large cohort who finished up at HEART with a Level One certificate in something to do with customer service.

Now, nearly 40, he has been stumbling in and out of minimum-wage jobs for years and can barely manage food, rent, light bill and, of course, phone credit. Mercifully, still single and without children, his big dream is, you guessed, to get a visa. You go figure how he avoided recruitment in some gang.

Actually, Wayne is in a good place compared to the hundreds of thousands with lower attainments than his. And his is a similar situation to more than half the workforce whose skills, attitudes and opportunities consign them to the under-$10,000 a week category. Then, too, being male, Wayne avoids the inevitable babymother obligations of the women in his category, even though his little niece looks expectantly to him daily for lunch money.

Here’s the question. Can we hope to build a peaceful, inclusive society and economy, growing at even more than five per cent a year, on this level of human resources capacity? This should be the obsessive national consideration in a week when we were throwing together institutions designed to improve inadequate human achievement and frantically making excuses for failing to even remotely reach national growth targets.

But that wasn’t the preoccupation, was it? Instead, the ruling political elite was spending great effort and multiple millions, not to lift the Waynes from their slough, but to offer them circus and another dose of toxic tribalism at conference, same time as the evidence of social ‘pop-down’ showed up, predictably, at Pembroke Hall High. And the guns barked and blood flowed in central Kingston and elsewhere.

Functionally illiterate ratio

On paper at least, it could be good if improved literacy and numeracy can now be better linked to skills training. Remember that one in five Jamaicans are functionally illiterate, with an uncounted proportion of lapsed literates. There is a close correlation between this reality and the crippling 70 per cent of the workforce without certification and thus earning pity-mi-little wages.

Let’s admit it. We need another surge in literacy (broadly understood to encompass numeracy and digital skills) so as to avert Wayne’s and our predicament. That means two things right away. The first is the reform of primary education so that we don’t promote illiterate ‘students’ and, coincidentally, a revival of the Alternative High School Diploma programme for adults, which the Jamaican Foundation for Lifelong Learning was promoting before it was decapitated.

It is not an option to be illiterate in a nation intent on our 2030 vision. That is what the Economic Growth Council should be telling us. That is one main objective which political conferences and manifestos bent on promoting prosperity ought to be promoting. This is the kind of goal that a truly national growth council (which it never has been) could inspire both political parties to unite around.

The approximately $12 billion which employers and employees contribute to HEART every year needs to be better spent, so as to fully align training to personal aspirations and national growth requirements. Levels One and Two ought to be administered in all high schools. Higher skill levels ought, wherever possible, to be executed by way of apprenticeship in commerce, industry and service centres. Give some of the employers’ contribution back to them to engage in approved programmes of advanced skills training, business ethics, personal discipline and financial literacy. Let the HEART administration provide strict supervision and certification.

I doubt whether the much-touted but spiritually flat merger of the three agencies will incarnate this kind of vision. Some of us remember the burning spirit suffusing the JAMAL enterprise in the early 1970s. It lasted till we carelessly corrupted it. The task of leadership and the proper use of wealth is not to big up money-changers and ogle after hedonists, but to inspire a whole people towards a fresh, educated and superbly trained future for all.

Have a HEART.

Ronald Thwaites is member of parliament for Kingston Central and a former education minister. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.