Ronald Thwaites | Playing with fire

Read the Letter of the Day in last Wednesday’s Gleaner from two teachers pleading for understanding of the horrible deficit of learning and behaviour standards among school youths in the wake of COVID-19. We were losing a high proportion of that next generation to illiteracy and poor socialisation before. That’s built into the system. Now, the situation has become compounded. And there is nothing in our actions or in the national budget, adequate to remedy it.

SILENT SCREAM

There is a survey of high school performances in circulation. It measures the percentage of grade-11 students in each of more than 150 institutions who leave with matriculable CSEC passes including English and mathematics. It is frightening reading. It should have provoked an emergency sitting of Parliament to reshape the education budget.

At least 100 of our high schools need the equivalent of a state of emergency. The great majority of their students do not achieve satisfactory levels so as to be able to become productive members of a 21st-century workforce. And remember, this base-line measures academic results only. The gaps in social and attitudinal competencies are bound to be dismal too.

Such failure in school is a national-security problem, as well as a personal life sentence for hapless children. Where is the consciousness? Where is the money? Is its absence part of the restraint of “social spending” which “fiscal prudence” demands?

We are crippling thousands, nearly two-thirds of each cohort of our students. If offences against a person are crimes, negligent and reckless damage to the mind and prospects of the individual, especially a child, should be no less a moral crime.

IS A REPUBLIC THE PRIORITY?

So we can bemuse ourselves by banishing King Charles of Jamaica as far as Goat Island. Until we achieve world-class levels of attitudinal, educational and training outcomes, we will still be serfs to the empires of a political and economic order premised on cruel inequality and fear-ridden classism. Do we need more evidence than the increasing social pop-down which we normalise with the anaesthesia of carnival and the implicit promise of a police state?

At the same time as the BPO leaders are warning that the $70,000-a-month, low-skilled jobs are soon to be made redundant by artificial intelligence, we tolerate increasing illiteracy and social dysfunction in our schools while paying down debt even faster than our creditors expect and congratulate ourselves for being the poster-child of the Washington Consensus. Members of parliament and councillors bang hard when Nigel extols this economic path then go outside to face down or hide from hungry-belly constituents.

HISTORY REPEATS

They crumble in the face of our self-imposed predicament just as the House of Assembly did after 1865. What’s really new? Our history, then and now, is resplendent with instances of our people serving the interests of one or another metropole to the detriment of our own well-being. Just check the “scrape an gone” bauxite industry for another example.

This is courting disaster. Illiteracy and low social skills can’t wait to be corrected until we reach 50 per cent debt to GDP. If we “lef it up” till then, the levels of inter-generational dystopia will nyam up all the fiscal space we have created. Take heed of what Don Robotham has been writing.

TIPPING POINT

It’s been like this for a long time and it promotes restlessness and eventual deviance. Remember “Queen Victoria’s Advice”, responding to the cry of Bogle’s people for land and relief from Eyre’s oppression, which dismissively told them to work hard for the very sources of their distress. In short, to be content with remaining the Children of Ham. Bogle and Gordon like Sharpe before them and Tacky before him, rejected that with predictable consequences to themselves.

In these times, we valorise their sacrifice, but fail to recognise that the same plot which defeated them is playing out even now. The private security industry has long known that their guards are really employees and not contractors. Now that the long-standing deception has been unmasked by the court, they say they will go out of business if made to pay. Thus, the ruse of the short-term contracts in the face of which the Ministry of Labour is shamefully impotent despite the patent injustice. Same argument that the plantation owners put up claiming economic disaster when slavery was abolished. Then and now, the political representatives did nothing to help.

BAD START

How about a deliberate and sustained effort to unify the nation around reformed education and decent work? Can divisive politics, the legacy of King Charles’ predecessors and their current multi-coloured ilk, take us there? Clearly not. So is reforming that stalemate what constitutional reform should be all about?

Finally, it is disturbing that the Reform Committee has had five meetings without the press being present and the occasions televised. This is the equivalent of courts being held in secret or the legislature being closed to public scrutiny. If they persist in this manner, don’t be surprised when their propositions are ignored or rejected.

Proof of dangerous intent is already evident in Saturday’s press report that the president of Republic of Jamaica will be chosen by both houses of parliament sitting together where a two-thirds majority will prevail. That means that the first president will be chosen by the Jamaica Labour Party since its members comprise more than two-thirds of both houses.

The present situation where, in the Senate, no party ever has that majority is being bypassed. And the same danger applies in circumstances, past or future where the PNP would have propelled their candidate to be governor general or president. That was then. This is now. The approach must be towards consensus going forward. Otherwise, the old polarisation is being perpetuated and the president will never be respected as a symbol of national unity.

They are playing with fire.

Rev Ronald G Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com