Martin Henry ADVERTISEMENTS ARE now running for staff for the High School Equivalency Programme. At last! Most adult Jamaicans, even those who have completed so-called secondary education, do not have a "high school diploma" which can take them forward into tertiary education and better jobs. They are stuck in an educational and career dead-end with few and only small points of exit.
Unlike the Americans we have never really awarded a national standardised high school diploma as such as a measure of general education competence. Well not after the First, Second and Third Jamaica Local Exams of the distant past when candidates had to pass all subjects to be certified. We offer subjects in external examinations at the end of High School for years GCE, then CXC. The "high school diploma" is the minimum number of subjects, including English Language and Mathematics, demanded for matriculation into tertiary education and by employers for better starting jobs. That magic number is five, with concessions made for fewer and demands made for more as necessary.
ADVOCATING
For years, I have been advocating both a high school diploma, which measures in some standard way the general education of the youngsters coming out of secondary level education at 17, and a high school equivalency diploma for those older who missed the boat for one reason or another and must catch up.
The United States led the way with the GED, the General Education Develop-ment test, which is now used worldwide to hurdle the no high school diploma barrier by some 860,000 people annually. After the Second World War, the alternative out of school diploma became a major ticket for the advancement of demobilised servicemen who wanted college education and access to better jobs.
Many successful and famous people are graduates of the programme: comedian Bill Cosby; the founder of Wendy's, Dave Thomas; and the Governor of the state of Delaware, Ruth Ann Minner, among many others. One in seven high school diplomas now awarded in the US is a GED. And, please note Jamaican employers and college registrars, 95 per cent of US employers regard GED graduates the same as traditional graduates from high school when it comes to hiring, salaries and opportunities for advancement. We have a history of deep suspicion and slow acceptance of the new and of the alternative pathway in education. That was the story of CXC.
FAILED JAMAICANS
High school education has excluded and largely failed Jamaicans. Up until the end of the 1950s, the few traditional high schools catered for the privileged who could pay and a handful of poor scholarship winners. Norman Manley provided 2,000 places through
the Common Entrance Examination in 1958. The number looks tiny now, but was truly revolutionary. Forty years later when the CEE was phased out it was still only able to offer traditional high school places to just one-quarter of some 60,000 candidates.
The inferior secondary schools, which evolved with Independence, for most of their years excluded their students from the prestigious GCE/CXC. The notorious Secondary School Certificate (SSC) had only minimal value and only at distinction level for entry to further education and work. The All-Age people didn't even have that opportunity.
When performance levels in the Traditional Highs are factored in, the majority of Jamaicans do not now have the equivalent of a high school diploma. And as Robert Gregory, The Executive Director of the HEART Trust/NTA which planned and developed the equivalency programme, points out, there is a shift in basic standards worldwide where the successful completion of secondary education is the accepted requirement for participation in the global market.
I am all too familiar with the story of exclusion very fortunately from the inside. In my immediate family, only two of us got into and successfully completed Traditional High School by the CEE route in my generation. Several others have acquired post-primary education by hard alternative paths. I recommended to one relative doing the US high school diploma by correspondence. And, with diploma in hand, she is now pursuing a first degree in late middle age, again by an alternative path to the traditional five CXCs colleges. Others have migrated and achieved up to doctoral level education in an easier, gentle system.
Still others have struggled through the JSC route to college, mostly teachers' college which accepted the subjects which could be done by correspondence out of the Ministry of Education. But too many of my own had too few opportunities for having a good go at post-primary education. In one painful case one who felt trapped at the un-degreed level of a business career for want of a high school diploma migrated in search of better and died in the pursuit.
Talking of the JSC and the High School Equivalency Programme reminds me of that education revolution in which I participated in the 1970s: The Jamaica Movement for the Advancement of Literacy (JAMAL) with its kitchen lamp symbol and its "into the light" slogan. JAMAL is to run the HSEP, hopefully with the success of the literacy drive which gave it birth.
EAGER TO LEARN
As a university student in late teenage, I volunteered to teach a Level IV class in an area which has since decayed into becoming a part of Kingston's inner city. My JSC students, older than I, were eager to learn and to get over the hurdles and get on with life. Several graduates made it into college and on to professional careers on that ticket.
JAMAL broke the back of the illiteracy problem, and the reversal back into the dark is most heart-rending. The Movement also gave many a ticket to their dreams through the Level IV JSC access to tertiary/professional education.
The University of Technology, whose Chancellor has dubbed it "the people's university", is piloting a prior learning assessment programme for the entry of adult students who have followed alternative paths to acquire pre-requisite knowledge and skills, often without formal certification. Northern Caribbean University (formerly West Indies College) has long practised taking them from where they are to where they want to go.
The introduction of a large-scale High School Equivalency Programme is set to open doors of opportunities for hundreds of thousands of previously hindered citizens. Cheers!
Martin Henry is a
communication specialist.
