By Dr. Ralph Thompson C.D., Contributor 
Thompson
THE PROBLEMS with the Jamaican education system have not arisen in the last 10 or 15 years; they are an accumulation of neglect and politicisation going back to pre-Independence. So the issue for voters in the forthcoming general election is not which party is to blame for the present crisis but rather which party will have the political stamina and administrative skills to carry on the necessary reforms. Consider the following:
TEACHERS
1. There are about 20,000 teachers in the government system, all of them underpaid and most of them undertrained.
2. Teacher classifications range from pre-trained (euphemism for untrained) through teachers with diplomas, pre-trained university graduates, trained graduates, principals of Primary schools and principals of Secondary schools.
3. Teachers serve throughout the system as follows:
Type of school # of teachers
Government Infant schools 533 (27per cent untrained)
Primary schools per se 5,470 (20per cent untrained)
All-Age schools Grades 1 to 6 3,672 (28 untrained)
All-Age schools Grades 7 to 9 1,590 (25 per cent untrained)
Vocational High schools 107
Other 739
TOTAL 20,665
4. Each category of teacher has a different scale for salaries and allowances and I estimate the median range to be $350,000 per annum (Salary and allowances) before income tax and other statutory deductions.
5. Teachers belong to the Jamaica Teachers Association (JTA), which is in effect a trade union with a potential sphere to influence of at least 80,000 voters at four persons per teacher family. This association has exerted considerable influence on successive political administrations down the years.
Under the present system which is haphazard at best, there are no uniform professional criteria for persons wanting to become teachers. Such persons can randomly trickle into the system in a number of categories as follows:
a) 'Pre-Trained' teachers - persons who are
Secondary School graduates.
b) Teachers with Diplomas - graduates of
Teacher Training Colleges.
c) "Pre-Trained" graduate teachers - persons
with a university degree.
d) 'Trained' graduate teachers - persons with a university degree and a Diploma in Education from the University of the West Indies OR a Diploma from a Teacher Training College.
7. According to the White Paper on Education, administration of the educational system is supposed to be decentralised. Yet in matters of student discipline and confrontations between parents and teachers, the Ministry of Education appears often to undermine the teachers and school boards which in any case reflect strong political influence in the appointment of members.
TEACHER TRAINING COLLEGES
8. There are six Teacher Training Colleges, including Mico which has a proud 150-year history of offering teaching opportunities to candidates from poor backgrounds, many of whom have made sterling contributions to education in Jamaica when the island was a gentler and less violent society.
9. Yet there is strong evidence that a large number of teachers now being turned out by the Teacher Training Colleges are not intellectually, psychologically or pedagogically capable of coping with current problems endemic in the system. Even after completing the three year Diploma course they are uncomfortable with standard English and therefore unsuccessful in trying to teach it at the Primary and Secondary levels, thus disenfranchising a generation of students from communicating effectively in a global economy.
10. The entry requirements for Teacher Training Colleges is 4 CXC passes, including English and Mathematics at Grades I, II or III. And many entrants are unable to pass four subjects at one sitting - having to make repeated attempts until they are successful.
11. There are some 302 Teacher College lectures, 107 of whom have post-graduate degrees. This means that only about a third of the lecturers at our Teachers Colleges are at a satisfactory professional level.
EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
12. This has been the most neglected link in the educational chain with disastrous results. We have at our peril failed to make a sufficient investment in the education and emotional support of the children of the poor in the crucial formative years of their lives, from birth to age seven, during which their characters are formed for better or for worse, proper values and attitudes inculcated, appropriate discipline instilled and their future maturity as productive citizens nurtured and confirmed.
13. One does not have to be a student of Freud to know that neurotic and psychotic behaviour have their roots in the traumatised experience of children during early childhood.
14. For whatever reasons the nuclear family unit, never very strong, has continued to deteriorate as the migration of parents and criminal activities in the inner cities take their toll. The home life of a large number of poor, young Jamaican children is chaotic and disorganised. Housing is sub-standard, children crowded three and four into one room, often with a mother who is in a relationship with a man who is not the father of the children. In rural areas, water drips from a distant standpipe; in inner-city communities it is often stolen as is electricity. Young children are exposed to early sexual stimulation and sometimes abuse, perplexed witnesses to a high incidence of domestic violence, noise, argument and filthy language. There is a general lack of proper sanitary facilities, poor personal hygiene, not to mention hunger and malnutrition in too many cases. Given these conditions, an even greater burden is placed on the State to try to compensate for them, to mitigate them and to provide healing oases of calm in a properly regulated pre-primary school system.
15. There are 29 government pre-primary schools compared with 1,631 so-called community basic schools run by private individuals. The population of these unregulated pre-primary school is 136,000 children, mostly from the underprivileged working class Government requires bars and restaurants to be licensed but not "Miss Matilda" who can set up an infant school on her verandah, often with inadequate sanitary conveniences, no insurance in case of fire, no legally enforceable monitoring of teaching methods, content or class size. Teachers in non-Government pre-primary schools (some 90 per cent of the total early childhood population) are usually untrained and the majority of them have no proper grasp of standard English and therefore are incapable of teaching it as a second language. In many case these teachers are paid at the minimum wage level for domestic helpers. Privately owned and run community basic schools at the pre-primary level set their own fees and charge what they want, as high as $70,000 a school year - a terrible strain on parents and/or grandparents when there are at the same time two or even three children to be schooled.
PRIMARY SCHOOLS
16. Disequilibrium in the system is evident at the primary level. There are currently about 182,566 students in what may be referred to as true Primary Schools receiving an education in Grades 1 through 6, from ages six to 11. But there are also 71,108 students at All-Age Primary Schools, Grades 1 to 6 who are grouped in the same building as Grades 7 to 9 sharing the same teachers. There is yet another category designated "Primary and Junior High Schools" with a population of 56,034 students. Some sectors of the All-Age and Junior High Schools have been baptised as Secondary Schools which blurs the border between Primary and Secondary institutions but as far as I can determine the total Primary School population is about 310,000 students in which about 9,000 teachers serve, a teacher/pupil ratio of 1 to 34.
17. With such a structure and lack of any centralised allocation of teachers, there is no uniform curriculum or standards of performance in the Primary School system comparable to the ROSE programme recently introduced in some grades of the secondary system.
SECONDARY EDUCATION
18. The total Secondary School population is 353,625 students of whom there are 77,913 in traditional Secondary Schools, the remaining 275,713 in non-traditional secondary schools and All Age Secondary departments. The teacher to pupil ratio in traditional secondary schools is 1 to 18 compared to 1 to 26 in non-traditional secondary schools.
19. All the shortcomings of the secondary school system, indeed of the entire system, come home to roost when the reality of CXC results have to be confronted. By publishing average results for traditional and non-traditional secondary schools combined, the sorry performance of the non-traditional schools has been hidden from the public. Now that the results have been disaggregated by the National Council on Education the truth is out - in non-traditional secondary schools the pass rate for mathematics is 14 per cent and 39 per cent for English.
TERTIARY EDUCATION
20. We continue to labour under the false belief, consciously or subconsciously, that Jamaicans have a "right" to Tertiary education, a popular shibboleth without any philosophic foundation. To be fair to past administrations which have fallen into this ideological trap, I heard Professor Orlando Patterson recently on Breakfast Club point out that 30 years ago the World Bank and the IMF were encouraging Third World countries to concentrate on Tertiary education. All that has changed, according to Patterson. The near unanimous consensus among experts in the field of education, according to him, is that allocation of scarce resources should be to early childhood education rather than tertiary education.
21. Dr. Davies, Minister of Finance, has recently raised the issue of government funding for tertiary education and perhaps the time has come to put ideology aside and debate pragmatically where we should allocate our dwindling resources.
22. In the 2000/2001 national Budget, $19 billion was allocated to education. Of this amount, $3.6 billion (18.5 per cent) was allocated to Tertiary education compared with $8.5 million (4.5 per cent) for Early Childhood Education.
23. Part of the pressure to apportion as much as 18.2 per cent to Tertiary education is due to acceptance by the Ministry of Education that the "economic" cost for a student's education should be subsidised by the Government. Current policy is for newly admitted students at UWI to pay 20 per cent of the economic cost of their education while students already enrolled pay only 10 per cent.
24. The "economic" cost of a university education calculated on "merged" faculty basis is about $510,000 per student which at a student population of about 6,000 comes to $3 billion. The students contribute $600 million, leaving some $2.4 billion to be paid by the Jamaican taxpayer.
25. There is an argument that the quality of students flowing through the school system (pre-Primary through secondary) into the university is so low that the overall academic level of university graduates is correspondingly low, with some exceptions, of course, as there always are.
26. Every student with true potential to benefit from a university education should be afforded the opportunity to do so based on a standard admissions examination like the SATs in America. But this is a far cry from trying to push numbers for numbers sake through the tertiary system, offering one year remedial reading courses and generally lowering academic standards to the point where many UWI graduates cannot speak standard English properly and display little or no general intellectual curiosity.
