LETTER OF THE DAY - Misplaced education focus
Published:Thursday | October 21, 2010 | 12:00 AM
The Editor, Sir:
Our perennial debate about education has now lingered on the point that we must have standards. We now have an inspectorate that is intent on raising standards through evaluation based on measurements that are at best tenuous.
The minister of education, many in the media and the business community have embraced this notion of outputs as a way of evaluating our education system. Principals and teachers are now the targets for criticism in this game, even though they are not the ones who have total control over the 'inputs'. Our minister of education and many in the Ministry of Education and elsewhere speak with the language of business about education. Our outputs, they claim, are below par. It is interesting that at a time when current business practices have brought the world's economy to its knees, we are adopting and dangerously buying into this business model as a critical model for improvement in education.
The problems in education have to do with how we have organised our society and, if the truth be told, every area of our society is in trouble. The problem we have as a society is one that has to do with diluted principles that are based on injustice. For example, we have traditional and non-traditional high schools. In many of the non-traditional high schools, we have placed principals who are there as reward for their roles in the Jamaica Teachers' Association or loyalty to the political parties. While some of these people have performed well, the future of our children is too precious to be left in the hands of persons so selected.
Critical issue
Another critical issue in our education system is how we are teaching many of our children, especially those in the non-traditional high schools. Research has long told us that we need to be taking a second-language approach to the teaching of not just English language, but all subjects in our schools. Our children who come to our schools with Jamaican Creole as their first language come and leave the same way. They cannot read English and our teachers and the ministry, while officially acknowledging this fact, do not have any way of ensuring that this is addressed appropriately.
As long as we continue to teach children and belittle their first language as bad, our figures for education will only represent ephemeral improvements, as self-esteem building and confidence will be absent.
Our focus on a business model is flawed and backward. I find it diversionary and steeped in ignorance. Like many other efforts in education, transformation will fail because it is based on an output-input model and not paying attention to the real issues.
I am, etc.,
LINVERN WRIGHT