Time for an education transformation commission

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The prime minister is to be congratulated on the appointment of this commission. It is long overdue. Doubtless, this powerful commission will touch on all the points they deem critical to a better outcome of what now passes for our education system. I am one of those who believe we, Jamaica, have the potential to make a bigger contribution to the ideas and strategies that will govern our world in the years ahead. I would like to see them give us the kind of education that will empower us to pursue that mission.

For example, I would like to see them include the following, inter alia, in their deliberations:

1. The purpose of education.

2. Teaching the philosophy of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, one of our best intellectuals in the system.

3. How to get back our identity that was taken away.

4. How to transform the system from merely ‘training’ us to be better employees to instilling in us the kind of curiosity that will more easily make us into thinkers, and conceptualisers, of how and why things happen.

5. Lovers of science and mathematics, because both are the foundation of the technology that is driving the world.

6. Instil in us the belief that, while working for others is honourable, our education should empower us to start our own enterprise for building ourselves and country versus waiting on the ‘big man’ to give us ‘a work’.

7. Start the movement for the transformation and co-ownership of the language that rules the world. Our European colleagues designed it to reflect that everything pure and excellent is white and that everything to the contrary is black, the colour of a great deal of the world’s people, including us here in Jamaica.

The purpose is for people of colour to see themselves as being unworthy and of no value and, what currently passes as our ‘education’, has, knowingly or not, subscribed to this aberration.

In summary, I believe this commission has the opportunity to make a real change in how we Jamaicans see and prepare ourselves for the new world ahead. I am hoping they will invite submissions from the public. I am looking forward to making mine.

LLOYD VERMONT Sr

Kingston