Ronald Thwaites | Some unanswered questions

First, How can we, as a nation, as individuals who love children, how can we know what we again have confirmed about early-childhood education yet continue, with false complacency, to avoid tending to the sector?

In fact, last week’s revelations that a half of the early-childhood institutions fall short of registration standards understated the deficit at this crucial level of human development.

How? Well, first of all, there are many more crèches and early-childhood centres than we are counting. In poor communities, the decline of the grandmother culture and the increasing pandemic of single parenting has led to more informal ‘keep and care’ operations being opened. So the reference point of the twelve standards for recognition, honoured in the breach by most of those we know about, does not reflect the whole problem.

The institutions of formal government have great difficulty in understanding and counting, let alone regulating, the informal economy in which upwards of 40 per cent of our people live.

In any event, the standards do not speak adequately to the central task of early education, which is character formation. A worried mother once asked for help to pay for extra lessons for her four year old and to buy him a tablet. She thought that would curb his behavioural problems. “Him need t’ings.”

We should adapt the Asian model, where mostly state-financed institutions require the attendance of all children, nourish them properly, and indoctrinate them with the habits, values and principles which will prepare them for formal learning, for work and for citizenship. They ought to be taught respect, manners, responsibility, initiative and self-restraint by people who model the same virtues in their own lives.

SENSITIVE EXAMPLE

Such a process requires sensitive example and teaching. The majority of the teachers in our basic schools are earning minimum wage and are insufficiently trained for their tasks. They have scant capacity to detect and treat the wide spectrum of social, emotional and cognitive challenges which children present, or to bring out their best talents.

The most productive investment the Jamaican Government and Jamaican parents can make now is the upskilling and regrading of all teachers in the early-childhood sector. This is a higher priority than infrastructure improvements. Given the alarming deficits disclosed last week, the effort should begin this summer. The Jamaica Teaching Council Act will have to grandfather hundreds of underqualified teachers into conformity. At the same time, there needs to be a plan for their continuing professional development.

Churches and charities which own or sponsor basic schools must insert themselves in the transformation process in each school, while constituting a formidable advocacy group to pressure the State to reallocate the money needed to reorient, retrain and pay teachers. A suitably trained teacher ought be available in every pre-primary classroom by 2025.

Every parent who can afford to, sends their little ones to a good kindergarten. They pay for quality early development. Less affluent parents should pay what they can for the same best quality. The Government must stop this foolishness of promising freeness and then delivering deteriorating standards.

The reengineering of the early-childhood sector ought to be the priority of the Education Oversight Committee and the Ecumenical Education Commission.

Also worrisome: an informal poll of 10 rural and urban schools last Friday indicated that they are still running, on average, a 20 per cent absentee rate!

“The disciples were arguing as to who would be the greatest in the kingdom. And Jesus took a child and said ‘ Anyone who takes care of a little child like this is taking care of me…and the Father who sent me’... .”(Luke 9:47)

JAMAICA, RWANDA AND BRITAIN

Why wasn’t the local press given the opportunity to question the president of Rwanda during his recent visit? Whose idea was that? Perhaps he could have told us of his role in the horrible genocide in his country, or tried to persuade us that his government’s respect for human rights matches the professed standards of the increasingly ineffectual British Commonwealth, which he is to lead and in which we want to have a big talk.

Impressive economic growth rates do not tell the whole story of a nation’s leadership. And even on that score, it would have been good to understand how Rwanda has revolutionised agriculture as the hub of their revived economy.

Most of all, we could have asked him about Rwanda’s new moneymaking arrangement with the United Kingdom, whereby illegal immigrants or asylum seekers reaching British soil will be arrested, and, in a reversal of the Middle Passage, transported half-way across the world to Rwanda in East Africa to “await processing”.

What a novel back-to-Africa route! No doubt to apply mostly to people of black and brown racial origin fleeing from countries which have been systematically raped by the erstwhile British Empire, the coat-tails of which some of us still desperately cling.

Doesn’t truth demand asking the right questions of ourselves and others?

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.