Martin HenryIF MINISTER of Education Burchell Whiteman's judgement about education issues is clouded by politics as Prof. Errol Miller claims, there is little doubt in my own mind that the Professor's exceptional intellect, expertise and judgement are seriously clouded by trade unionism.
Prof. Miller's column 'Minister Burchell Whiteman's Dilemma' (Thursday, August 31) should best be read as a prejudiced statement by a former president and a key advisor of the Jamaica Teachers Association than as a reasoned and reasonable statement by the Professor of Teacher Education at the UWI, Mona. To the extent that Minister Whiteman's character and motives are on the line in Errol Miller's column, he himself should not expect exemption from similar analysis.
The Minister does not need any defence from me, but in the interest of fair play and balance, I write, conscious of troubling superior forces.
Mr. Whiteman is the Minister of Education because he is a politician. Nobody who is not a politician can be the Minister of Education.
The stark, polar contrast that the professor has drawn as to whether Burchell Whiteman "will choose to be a loyal member of the Cabinet and the party or a defender of education when the knife is applied to education in order to accommodate the FINSAC debt obligations on the public purse", is an artificial concoction which should be exposed for what it is.
Accepting for the moment that the proposed teacher cuts are FINSAC-driven, the naked, painful fact of the matter is that the FINSAC debt exists. How it came to be is quite another matter. Without a FINSAC-like response by the Government, the collapse of the financial sector would have plunged this country into catastrophic chaos in which education, like all other sectors, would suffer great losses.
The economy is stagnant and even contracting. The reasons are another story. To expect under these circumstances that education will remain untouched and to demand such is absurd, to say the least.
Trade unionists are hardly ever exercised by the question of who is to suffer loss for their gain. For the 'benefit' of education, which hospital is to close? Which police station? Which road is to be left in disrepair? Should the tourism industry or agriculture budgets be cut further? Who should be made redundant if not teachers? Nurses? Police officers? Extension officers? Fire-fighters? Or politicians?
The fact of the matter is that the knife must be applied to education as to every other sector. It can be applied in one of two basic ways: The old way of pretence where the few available and shrinking dollars are thinly scattered over a wide field and a lot is done badly. So what is cut out of the system is quality. This is the history of the politics of education in this country over the last generation. But neither politics nor vehement union advocacy can defeat the laws of economics as Michael Manley 'the free education' Prime Minister learned the hard way.
The other way of applying the knife is the approach of the systematic focusing of resources in strategic areas, painfully knowing that some things cannot be done, given the limited resources. The politically courageous decision for cost-sharing was a move in the right direction for expanding resources, albeit quite modestly.
The Education Green Paper led by Minister Whiteman, despite its flaws, is a major effort to systematise and to focus, to raise performance and accountability and to get more quality output for input made. Sectoral interests, including teachers, have torn into the Green Paper in defence of their own narrowly perceived self-interests.
Education is the largest bureaucracy in the public sector, with the largest budget and many competing interests. Engin-eering substantial change will be extremely difficult and painful. Mr. Whiteman, the politician, should take the Green Paper to parents and students 'live and direct' as the biggest, least organised but most important and vulnerable component of the system.
For years the inescapable education component of the national debt has been paid with lack of supplies, libraries, computer labs and even toilets. The one untouchable area was teachers' jobs. Reasonably asking jobs to carry a small part of the great burden now has unleashed the full fury of teachers and their advocates all in the name of the larger national interest.
The view that the public interest is analogous with the interest of teachers and administrators is at the very least wrong and out of order.
The Minister's dual roles as politician and long-time educator, rather than impaling him on the horns of a dilemma, have placed him in a favourable, if difficult, position to seek what is best for education under the circumstances that the whole country is forced to exist.
Visionary calibre
To believe for a moment that Professor Errol Miller and the JTA, with their own sectoral interests to defend, can offer more balanced and feasible solutions than the Minister, all things considered, is naive to say the least.
In these difficult times all round, Burchell Whiteman, the educator, is most useful to education as a politician in the Cabinet and party where he can exert maximum pressure against the competition for scarce resources which exists in any government, anywhere, anytime, than he could ever be running a school somewhere or being president of the JTA.
If education has to have surgery and it certainly does there is no one else to whom I would prefer to entrust the knife. I say this on the basis of knowing the man and some of his leading detractors, and on the basis of the visionary calibre of his Green Paper on Education which is easily the most far-reaching and important public policy document on education in a generation. The opposition it has attracted from special interests confirms its radical nature, and a reading of its content with no axe to grind confirms its basic good sense.
Mr. Whiteman, whom I have criticised in the past and will criticise again as the need arises, need not lose sleep over being labelled a loyal politician and a loyal educator with a conflict of interest. Professor Miller knows, or should know, that life is a series of negotiations and balancing of contending forces.
Something else which he should know wearing his professor's hat, not his union activist hat, is that defending teachers and defending education is not necessarily the same thing.
The quick, sharp, savaging of Minister Whiteman as he gingerly works his way out of the clutches of his 'former colleagues' is to me a clear and powerful indication that he is only valuable to them as a defender of their status quo at all costs.
Indeed, were Minister Whiteman to capitulate to special interest pressures, especially of the personally manipulative type which the Miller column represents, he would be both a bad educator and a bad politician, not to mention a compromised human being.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
