Ronald Thwaites | Why the economy can’t grow

Who is daring to confront that question? Where is truthful analysis of our malaise featuring in the election campaign? Not just about GDP numbers and macro-economic statistics but about ordinary people’s sense of well-being. We are led to believe that two per cent is OK or we blame Beryl, COVID-19, Manley, the IMF, etc, for our increasing inequality and weak productivity.

EARLY VOTING

Watch with me the line at the US Embassy last Friday – and every other day. From crack of dawn and at huge expense, hundreds of young people; some of the best of our productive workforce, voting with their feet – even if it means bearing with cold, discrimination and a nation being overtaken by the spirit of the immigration czar Stephen Miller, himself described by his president, only half tongue in cheek, as wanting “a country of about 100 million looking most like himself “.

REMITTANCE VALUE?

Do I hear the apologists saying that out-migration contributes to growth through repatriation of income ? It would be a fascinating study to compare the value of remittances with the contribution which thousands of teachers, nurses and the other skilled workers, whose absence we are now regretting, would have accumulated if they had not self-exiled. What we already know is that migration breaks up already brittle family ties.

THOSE LEFT BEHIND

So most of the best migrate, the bulk settle uncomfortably into low-paying unproductive work while the dangerous minority lurch towards the scuffling or criminal subculture with many lining up at the gate of May Pen Cemetery.

Whoever wins the election, the majority will not flourish until a literate, skill-adept, socially adjusted workforce is the norm, not the exception. Importing desperate workers from Haiti who, happy to be released from their own Caribbean version of Gaza, will work for subsistence wages, is an evasion rather than an answer to our systemic labour and production problems. No country can prosper with one-third of its youth cohort (about 10,000 strong) failing basic educational indices every year.

INCREASED CONCERN

Last week the opinion pages of the press were unusually full of comment on the state of education. This is unusual and good. Rebecca Tortello warned against the “summer slide” which is worsening our growth prospects right now as tens of thousands of students idle and find mischief during the summer break.

Those already disadvantaged will regress up to one grade in reading. Despite this and without catch-up, we will advance them to a higher grade in September where the inevitability of their failure and ours stares at us. The froth of campaigning ought not to have prevented a national programme of summer engagement of learning, reinforcement and recreation.

At one ongoing effort I am aware of, the objective is to move weak Grade 7 students a grade higher in reading and mathematics over the “holidays”. They are being coached by generous 6th Form students from a high-ranking high school and some heroic volunteer teachers. Many students come because breakfast and lunch are provided, kindness of a private sector company whose leader is intensely aware of how crucial an educated workforce is to his and the national enterprise.

THOSE LEFT BEHIND

Perilously, one-third of those who most need the tutoring, don’t attend regularly or at all. Most do not have stable, caring adults in their lives. Others need help to afford basic necessities. A tough and compassionate social worker, not one to be deterred by raw and deviant circumstances, is essential to act as a liaison between home and school so preventing these youth being lost to productive life by their middle-teen years.

CONSEQUENCES

The effect of the breakdown of important institutions of the society, churches, youth clubs and sports and cultural associations, are spilling over into the behaviour of youth already dispirited by poverty and addled by social media. A significant number of the Grade 11s in one school simply refused to turn up for their end-of-year examinations. They do not see that scholastic achievement is important to their life prospects. Others in their frustration, follow-fashion and self-disrespect, become promiscuous by or before 10th Grade.

DISCIPLINE

Basil Jarrett wrote about the value of military discipline. I am now convinced that every secondary school student ought to be a member of a uniformed group. Efforts towards this objective during my tenure in the Ministry of Education were a failure. This is an area the security forces should lead.

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

Then there was the impressive piece by Tonia Williams pointing out how rigid and irrelevant much of the curriculum in our schools is to the life situation of the students. She emphasised how critical early detection of reading difficulties is and how crippling and counterproductive is the treadmill of automatic promotion.

We encounter school leaders who are so beholden to the exam culture, so craven for the ministry’s nod of approval and so pessimistic of their students potential that they ignore the actual learning needs and challenges of their students, all the while excusing teachers of their complicity in the pop-down.

Many of the children we are testing after a yearlong special reading and maths programme in Grade 7, fail to achieve, not because they are dumb, but because the fundamentals of literacy in both subjects were denied them not least because they were tested in a language which is not yet their own.

CHANGE COURSE

The Jamaican economy cannot grow and our people will fail to find purpose and satisfaction if we continue this expensive folly. No wonder “5 in 4” has had to be abandoned.

The State must support those who are genuinely trying to bring about transformation in education policy and practice. The most crucial recommendations of the Patterson Report are still being ignored.

National discourse must turn away, even in the heat of campaigning, from phony statistics and do what is needed to curb this most urgent problem of national security and economic development. No, it’s not all the teachers fault as Leachman et al argued last week. But they, the churches, parents and the private sector have far more vigorous and less self-serving roles to play in its solution. This could be the one unifying cause that would transform this nation.

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