Editorial | Listening to Grace Baston

Campion College is often ranked at the top of the pile among public high schools in Jamaica. Admission to Campion is generally coveted by parents of the top-performing children in the placement exams at the end of their primary education.

Usually, therefore, Campion gets the best and brightest, who maintain their early promise throughout their stay at the school. The norm in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams is for 100 per cent of Campion's students to pass at least five subjects in a single sitting, including maths and English. Obviously, therefore, the people who run the school, and teach at Campion College, understand a thing or two about education and the process of teaching and learning in the Jamaican context, and how to build on the abilities of the students they enrol each year.

That is why we take seriously the rare public interventions by Campion's principal, Grace Baston, on questions of education in Jamaica, especially what is to be done to lift standards. Policymakers, too, should listen.

Recently, Ms Baston entered the fraught, and often emotive, debate on language in Jamaica, including what status ought to be afforded the island's patois/creole and how English should be taught in schools. She noted, as The Gleaner has done, that the tension between these two languages wasn't addressed by the Orlando Patterson commission on the transformation of Jamaica's education system. Ms Baston believes that was a shortcoming.

She said: “We continue to ignore that profoundly alienating and disenfranchising effort of not recognising that most of our children from poorer homes have a first language which is not Standard English…[T]he failure to take this reality seriously (and) to draw on the research done by our linguistic scholars at the UWI (University of the West Indies) and to have teachers trained in the ability to engage students in their first language and then, through that language, to introduce to Standard English, is an injustice.”

LEGITIMACY OF JAMAICAN PATOIS

Put another way, Ms Baston wants recognition for the legitimacy of Jamaican patois/creole and for English, and the mechanics thereof, to be taught as a second language. Such arguments have not in the past found favour with policymakers, who tend to view the debate as a distraction from getting on with the business of embracing English as the global tool of business and economic development.

Indeed, recently, in remarks at the opening of a business processes outsourcing operation – in which he said that Jamaica should be a multilingual country and that English should be embraced as the “ideal” language of business – Prime Minister Andrew Holness displayed his irritation with Jamaican patois/creole advocates who suggest that the language's use tends to be a source of social discrimination.

“Take away all the cultural issues about language being a barrier to access and the ability to speak in our social context being a barrier to access,” Mr Holness said. “We need to get over that and ensure that we protect the English language in our country, as discrete from our Jamaican language, which we must speak as we will and as we want. But get over this nonsense that one is going to block you from access in the society.”

The point, however, which is the core of Ms Baston's argument, is not about protecting English. 0It is not, as we understand it, that anyone wants to displace English, which is the language of instruction and pedagogy in Jamaica. The issue, is recognising Jamaican patois/creole while making English accessible to the majority whose mother tongue, or the language they speak in their homes and communities and in social interaction, is patois.

FRANK DISCUSSION

The process has to start with policymakers coming to terms with the latter fact. That will open the way to a frank discussion of how English is, and ought to be, taught in schools. Indeed, it says something profound that after seven years of primary education more than a fifth (22 per cent) of the cohort – as was shown in this year's exit profile – isn't proficient in language arts. Only 14.4 per cent are considered 'highly proficient'.

While the data says that 62.7 per cent are proficient, it is reasonable to assume (the breakout hasn't been published) that a hefty proportion of this group falls at the lower end of the proficiency spectrum.

The disruption of schools because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the education ministry says, makes it difficult to compare this year's primary exit profile (PEP) results with those of previous years. Nonetheless, the Patterson Report, using data from the 2019 test, highlighted the crisis in the critical use of language (English) among Jamaica's primary school students.

“A breakdown of the language arts results indicated that a third of students at the end of primary school could not read, 56 per cent could not write, and 57 per cent could not identify information in a simple sentence,” the document said.

This struggle with English doesn't end at primary school. It persists at the secondary level. Consistently at the CSEC level between a fifth and a quarter of Jamaica's students fail at English and large swathes of those who 'pass' merely pull through. Indeed, the island's universities often run remedial courses in English for students who, on paper, have already met the institutions' matriculation requirements.

Kingston: We have a problem. With English!

Large swathes of Jamaicans are not very proficient in the language, even if they have a good enough grasp of it to go about the basics of their daily lives. The situation demands frank conversation and acceptance that the mother tongue of the majority, the language in which they are most comfortable, is patois/creole. Having come to that realisation, we can open English to all of us by the way we teach it – as a distinct language from the one that most Jamaicans know. Perhaps similar to the way Spanish or French might be taught.