Alfred Dawes | Jingles all the way

There is a saying attributed to Confucius. “If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years, educate your children.” This is not just an abstract expression. It has been proven repeatedly that societies that embrace education and technology do better in the long run.

As much as how I detest the comparisons between Singapore and Jamaica, we need to look no further than how a similarly poor island nation was able to leap to first-world status in the lifetime of her founding fathers. Meanwhile, we lament in poverty how Lee Kwan Yew came to Jamaica to learn from us and took our model to build Singapore. That legend is only half true. Mr Kwan Yew did learn from us. He learned what not to do and invested in his people. Singapore thrives while today we are confronted with the grim revelations that 65% of Jamaicans aged 25 to 54 have no examination passes at secondary level. How can we even consider attaining Vision 2030 with this situation in 2021?

Clearly, something is wrong with our education system. If you can read this column you are in an elite group. Only 40% of persons taking the math and English exams achieve a passing grade. When we speak about education apartheid it is evident that we are an extremely inequitable society. The poorest 20% of the population were worst off with 78 per cent having no examination passes. Children missing school give reasons such as sickness, lack of money and, almost unimaginably, rain as top reasons for their absence. To be poor is indeed a crime. With underfunded, under-resourced and crowded schools available to them, how do we expect the poor to escape the clutches of their destiny?

We love the stories of the poor who overcame the odds, attained a tertiary education and achieved success in life despite their challenges. That is the exception. The rule is that you are confined to performing low-paying menial jobs, or if your desire is to escape poverty you align yourself with politics or crime. That is the harsh reality of the country in which we live. Critics of education will say that businesses make money and education is not necessary. They ought to be reminded that businesses fold far more than they are successful, and the trend of the world is less in the direction of mom and pop operations and more towards large entities with convenience and low margins as their selling points. We also fail to notice that we as a people do poorly in transmitting intergenerational wealth.

BEST ESCAPE FROM POVERTY

The truth is education provides the best generational escape from poverty. Educated parents tend to have children who do better in school and end up with higher-paying jobs. Educated, middle-class persons are more likely to marry educated middle-class partners, thus adding to the household’s net worth rather than dividing it. Educated couples delay having children and have fewer children overall. Their attention is not split among a menagerie and they can help them with schoolwork and other extracurricular activities. It is hard-pressed to find a family that has delved back into poverty after their ancestors escaped it through education. Hustlers seldom have that legacy effect on future generations no matter how much money they have.

A well-travelled friend pointed out that you can tell a lot about the educational level of a people by the advertisements in that country. Our advertisements are primarily jingles and simplistic skits. There are no Superbowl quality ads with subtle humour or intellectual discourses that appeal to the analytical side of our brains to make the decision to choose one product over the other. Even our various ministries and government bodies have caught on to the jingle craze to get their message across. Practically every appeal for personal responsibility for one’s health is communicated with a jingle.

Even the Bank of Jamaica’s inflation targeting message is a jingle complete with gyrating dancers advising us that the inflation rate cannot be too low or high. But we do what we must to get the message across. Dare we dream that one day it will not take catchy refrains to make one wash their hands or destroy mosquito breeding sites because the target population will grasp the seriousness of the message without any dumbing down necessary.

If we are serious about growth as a country, we need an educated workforce. The rising stars of the business process outsourcing industry grow by poaching talent from other operations because the talent pool is so limited. We cannot improve our public health system or even consider competing with other medical tourism destinations because we do not have enough radiographers, nurses, physiotherapists or other allied medical staff. Jamaica will be the logistics hub of the Caribbean only when we have enough trained employees to make the massive infrastructural developments make sense.

Heavy investments in education in India and China lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and created talent pools that drew in manufacturing and business support operations. They need not innovate to remain where they are, but those countries are already planning for the next hundred years. It is time we move away from planning from one election cycle to the next and sow the seeds of success for our grandchildren through tangible reforms and investments in our education system. Let us dream of a jingle-free Jamaica.

- Alfred Dawes is a general, laparoscopic, and weight-loss surgeon; Fellow of the American College of Surgeons; former senior medical officer of the Savanna-la-Mar Public General Hospital; former president of Jamaica Medical Doctors Association. @dr_aldawes. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and adawes@ilapmedical.com.