Ronald Thwaites | Aiming at wrong targets

Toby was a bird-boy in the swamps of southern Clarendon. One season he talked his way into being lent a gun and some shots. In the intoxication of power, he shot every crane bird, gaulin, john crow and insect in sight. Finally he shot off his own big toe.

DISSING THE JPS

Until evidence is produced that the Jamaica Public Service Co (JPS) has been deliberately or negligently sitting on their hands in relation to full restoration of light and power in Beryl’s wake, both government and those suffering in St Elizabeth and elsewhere, are directing their frustration at the wrong target.

It is convenient though, isn’t it. The spiralling misery index has political consequences and so Daryl, Phillip and a more circumspect Andrew, join the chorus of complaint and indirectly, stoke the sufferers’ anger. Truth suffers.

LET SOLDIERS ASSIST

Belly-aching isn’t helping. From the pictures in the media much time has to be spent clearing bush and replanting fallen poles. Why haven’t the Jamaica Defence Force been deployed to assist the JPS with their impressive enablement of manpower, equipment and technical expertise?

What other priority, what more pressing target could there be for the military to engage rather than to restore the country to full productivity after the still under-estimated consequences of this natural disaster? But no: it’s easier to cuss and appear to drape up the utility company whose monopoly in generation and distribution, you same one have sanctioned.

ABOUT TEACHERS

The same wrong-footedness applies to stanching the teacher shortage. It is not as if we haven’t been staring this escalating crisis in the face for several years, with sector leaders first denying its existence then downplaying its severity. Giving teachers higher pay as part of public sector reform was a necessary but insufficient measure. They had languished during the IMF years and are convinced that they deserved percentage increases equal to that of ministers and members of parliament.

Professor Canute Thompson of the Caribbean Centre for Educational Planning has presented valuable research on the factors affecting teacher migration. His findings itemize continuing wage insufficiency given inflation. Add lack of resources for teaching, poor school leadership, poor working conditions and negative behaviours of students.

Who is listening to the teachers while the relays of recruiters do their harvesting? Which of these research findings have been interrogated and remediated by those in charge of national expenditure? Three weeks away from the opening of a new school year, already cramped by hurricane damage and silent post-COVID-19 consequences, the nation must ask what transformative steps are being taken to cope.

The Education Code of 1980 is completely unserviceable to address current conditions. The reformed draft is hardly better. After a gestation period of about a decade and a half, the Jamaica Teaching Council Bill is still not law. If we do not pick up speed and depth of thought in pursuit of education reform, this nation cannot prosper inclusively. Social unrest, based significantly on educational inequality, will continue no matter how many unconvicted youths the police kill and how much closer we veer complacently towards a national security state. Dr. Martin Luther King reminded the world that you cannot murder murder as now happens in Jamaica with impunity and perverse approval.

LOCAL RECRUITMENT

I respectfully submit that recruiting foreign classroom teachers is to aim at the wrong target. We have tried it before, expensively and with indifferent effect. A more meaningful target would be to triple the enrolment in our teachers colleges this year.

Extend catch-up opportunities for Grade Eleven students with the aptitude and personality, absent the necessary CSEC passes. Supplement the already budgeted Grades 12 and 13 money with tuition scholarships and appropriate bonding for trainee teachers.

Use technological connectivity for scarce teaching expertise to serve virtual classrooms. Mandate that in five years, no one leaves primary school without adequate (not watered-down) literacy, numeracy and social skills. Start now. A student-teacher recruitment effort should coincide with the publication of CSEC and CAPE results later this month.

ACCENTS CAN CONFOUND

Specialist expatriate teachers can be very useful at the teacher training level, much moreso than in lower level classrooms. Differences of culture and especially of diction make many outsiders unintelligible in Jamaican schools where, even now, thousands of our children do not fully comprehend what they hear and are supposed to understand in Standard Jamaican English. This is less likely to be an impediment at the tertiary level.

URGENCY

The situation is past desperate. Recently, I observed numeracy testing of the Grade 7 intake of one a typical non-traditional high school. The average level was Grade 3 proficiency! Unaided, how can these students possibly manage secondary level mathematics? And the main contributory factor in the poor numeracy outcomes was, you guessed it – illiteracy. Most of the candidates do not comprehend the questions they are being asked to answer.

Regularly, assistance is sought from me by worried parents and anxious children, most of whom can hardly read or compute but are whizzes on the gaming and computer sites of their smart phones. They walk with long book lists and other school requirements costing at least $20,000. Unaffordable.

There is still time before September morning for us to wheel and come again and aim at the only correct targets: universal literacy and the enablement and accountability of our teachers.

If present and aspiring teachers don’t at least glimpse positive change coming, compounded with the inevitable “negative behaviours of students” (to quote Prof. Thompson’s survey findings again), few of them will resist the dollars, visas and family opportunities being offered abroad.

MORE MINING IS A BAD TARGET

Recently each quarter’s economic growth can be attributed largely to mining and quarrying. Both political parties seem oblivious to the tipping point of environment degradation we are reaching as a result. Retired custos and deservedly honoured ‘Billy’ Shagoury invites us to look at the yawning craters nastying up the curtilege of the new section of the East-West highway. That land and so much more elsewhere will never be restored. Why? The immediate prospect of once-off small money takes our eyes off the real target of a sustainable future. We allow the metropole to enrich themselves at our expense. What’s new!

So our teachers and better qualified people migrate; the rest remain under-educated and our land is permanently despoiled because we are aiming at the wrong targets. We hobble ourselves much like lack-a-toe Toby.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com