Letter of the Day | Credentialled incompetents create mirage of expertise
Published:Tuesday | June 3, 2025 | 12:06 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
Philip Patterson’s In Focus column in The Sunday Gleaner of June 1 is timely and incisive. I fully agree, especially with his call for intellectual rigour in PhD programmes pursued by Jamaican educators and education administrators. My interaction with thousands of A-QuEST members and alumni – many of them exceptionally gifted – reveals deep concerns about the quality of doctoral work now flooding our education sector.
Too many so-called ‘doctorates’ appear to be the fruit of financial outlay rather than genuine, critical, doctoral-level engagement. Gifted children often detect this dissonance and see through the charade. They are quick to ‘talk’ academics who, despite their lofty titles, cannot convincingly articulate subject fundamentals critically. Patterson rightly highlights the flawed model of teaching pedagogy atop weak subject knowledge.
Without robust disciplinary grounding, pedagogical training is not just ineffective – it’s dangerous. Worse still, administrative ranks are filling with credentialled incompetents, creating a mirage of expertise and a fortress against reform. If Jamaica is to escape this intellectual quicksand, we must restore scholarly standards – genuinely showcasing rigorous, content-driven doctoral education.
DENNIS MINOTT