Education and change: fear or opportunity

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The issue of education and change is not an unexpected event in Jamaica. Moving from a colonial to an independent state there should have been a programme to fundamentally change colonial system of education; but, instead we have witnessed, over the years, this “pitchy-patchy” and Band-Aid type approaches to respond to some of the problems identified in the system and society.

In a dysfunctional educational system, the policy-makers decide to address this matter by unleashing STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) as a response and panacea to the perceived short-comings. Can there be success from STEM; these initiatives which will be conducted in a setting in which there is gross deficits in reading, writing and reasoning among a great majority of our students?

There is an interesting and instructive view about responding to change. It does not only invoke curiosity about policy-makers’ perception of the educated person; but it is also enlightening how to advance an appropriate approach in introducing a new section into the national education curriculum. One ‘enlightened eye’ argues that policy response to change is determined by perception of change by the policy-makers; if perception is a threat, then policy-makers will react with self-defence. On the other hand, if change is distinguished as an opportunity, then that perception will be able to guide effective research and reasonable new policy responses.

Let us assume that our policy-makers see change in education in terms of an opportunity, what kind of research and training were conducted to facilitate the application of STEM in the present system of education? What is the nature of the programme? Will it be integrated into early childhood education, secondary and tertiary levels?

In The Post Capitalist Society, Peter Drucker describes the impact of the new revolutions in science and its transformative influence on the global and national societies in terms of the creation of the “knowledge society”, and that people live and work in this setting. He shows that this revolution has created a massive social shift with the individual as the central feature of this new world; and that knowledge resides in and created by and taught by a that having the person as the central features of the knowledge raises new issue and challenges (and fear) for the traditional policy-makers.

The educated in this globalised world must be able to appreciate other cultures, traditions by their trained perceptions and their grasping fully the quality of analysis (and application/synthesis) as opposed “to being bookish”.

The HEART/NSTA Trust’s motto, ‘Skill is Power’, grounded in competency-based education, which failed. One thing that is certain, in all of this, is that if the setting in which STEM is immersed is characterised by poor qualities in reading, writing and reasoning, then it cannot be a fertile ground for the planting of that system. The idea of democracy and democratic government has had a strong relationship with education and the educated person.

LOUIS MOYSTON

Kingston