Ronald Thwaites | Concentrating on solutions

“Sir, I am a single parent and one of my girls wants to be a dentist. Although I am a senior teacher and earn from tax-free extra-lessons, my take-home pay could never cover her fees at UWI. Her father is not a bad person but he has never been willing to commit to us, so I can’t rely on him. I don’t really want to leave my elderly mother but now with so much hostility towards immigrants coming to the USA, I better seize the opportunity ... I won’t be returning to school after this term ends.”

That, almost verbatim, was last week’s conversation. She has been at the school for 10 years. Three other teachers there are quite open that they are only waiting for the recruiters to reach Kingston to sign up to leave.

What, if anything, is the Ministry, the government, the society doing to recover from the increasing loss of quality in our schools which feeds directly into criminality, gang culture and weak economy?

Except you want to kill all you think are criminals, please figure that it costs one and a half million dollars a year to keep each prisoner in squalid conditions and destructive idleness. That is double what a minimum wage earner makes and about the same as you pay for a year of university studies. Anything sensible can go so?

My lady and uncounted other teachers and similar middle-class workers, see their standard of living slipping with each trip to the supermarket where half a cabbage costs $750 this week.

BURDEN OF ORDINARY LIVING

The burden of their ordinary living alongside the crippling poverty of many they teach and the gauche, careless consumerism of the ruling elite, demotivates them. They are angry about the chi-chi of corruption in their dealings with state agencies.

They foresee that the frenzy to spend billions on pothole repair, now about to become the largest business in the country, is as much motivated by the waste of pre-election “run wid it” let-offs, as by concern that our roads are no longer car-worthy.

No comparable money for teachers is even promised in this season of great promises, so they leave quietly and with them our hopes of individual flourishing, improved productivity and global competitiveness. Many of our most talented people have lost faith in Project Jamaica.

Realistic pay increases and added accountability must go together. Leaving the children alone in the classroom while teacher is absent, gone to meeting, prayer session or grief counselling is unacceptable. In unstructured time students revert to the habitual behaviour of street mayhem and social media addiction. We must stop making excuses for weak outcomes.

Freed from the lash, we do not know how to impose the discipline, to model the self-restraint, the delayed gratification, which are essential for learning and living. “I want what I need now because I don’t trust your promises anymore”, is a silent refrain.

SPENDING ON THE WRONG THINGS

Hear Banker Lee Chin speak about upskilling the NCB staff to double profitability. Hear Dennis Chung on the trap of low-skilled, low productive labour leading to the dead-end of low economic growth, dissatisfaction and anti-social conduct.

Nothing will change, no matter which party forms the administration, unless and until the schools turn out well-socialised, literate and numerate students and we effectively remediate the adult population whose lives and ours are disfigured by lack of these same attitudes and skills. People’s behaviour is heavily related to the way they have been schooled – or not.

Four generations ago, students could matriculate from primary school to teachers college and from there on to the external BA degree. By contrast, at one not a-typical high school with which I am interacting, there are more than thirty first formers so illiterate that they cannot recognize the letters of their names, despite being in school for eight years. They will be promoted to a higher grade in a few months at their peril and our expense. We are spending on the wrong things.

SOCIAL MEDIA

The Australians are legislating restrictions on the use of social media by children. It is a necessary but almost impossible task. Educators, even at the tertiary level, testify to the difficulty of getting students to read even required texts. The seduction of social media governs young peoples lives and blunts their consciences. Abused, it can be a new colonization of the mind, more devastating than the old shackles. These platforms offer so many advantages mixed up with so much distraction and evil. Leachim Semaj has told us of efforts in his own family to proctor the exposure to social media. It is time for public discussion on the subject. The infection isn’t going away.

REPRESSION ALONE WON’T WORK

A senior policeman acknowledged last week that most communities in the South and Central St Andrew Divisions are “hotbeds of crime”. Sir, why is this so after all the years and expensive efforts at pacification? Is there an evil spirit at work in these places? How is it that the more guns and ammunition which are seized, the more these weapons proliferate? Where is the relentless effort (not pale ZOSOs please) to resocialise the schoolboys and girls in these communities; to make their schools institutions of excellence?

Because until such questions are confronted, all the states of emergency, the indefinite detention and the police excesses, are evidence of failure. What does our crime prevention history, from Roy McNeill and Shearer’s time until now, teach us?

My experience tells me that mandatory inclusion in a uniformed group, unrelenting character formation, literacy and numeracy education, combined with training and certification in an employable skill while still in school, are affordable and effective complements to the containment measures which, in our bankruptcy of mind, we favour exclusively.

We must start spending effectively on the things which can really make a lasting difference.

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