THE EDITOR, Sir:JUDGING FROM the coverage in your newspaper, the latest education debate has ground to a halt. Just like that, what was a promising opportunity to face the reality of our failing education system seems to have succumbed to evanescence.
Sadly, this is a familiar routine. One gets the sense that our interest stops at the controversy of an issue and rarely extends to the pursuit of a positive outcome.
Yet, I urge those who harbour even a smidgen of interest in the future of this country to treat the topic of education a bit
differently.
Without staying power on the nation's agenda, solving the education crisis has little chance of success. And without success in education, there is scant hope for the future of Jamaica.
It is only when all Jamaicans have access to a system that allows them to reach their academic potential that we will have the critical mass of skills to launch a sustained attempt at development.
Before then, all we can hope for is a patchwork of starts and stops, interspersed with pseudo-intellectual chatter.
It is no longer enough for us to point to the five to 10 per cent of our children who routinely distinguish themselves through academic excellence. That is not the story of a successful education system.
That is the story of the Jamaican potential. Until this potential is provided for equally in every school, in every parish, in every income bracket, in every social class, we cannot claim success in our education system.
To a degree, I sympathise with what appeared to be the Education Minister's attempt to grasp for a revolutionary response to the education predicament. Given the political dynamic, however, the best she could have hoped for was a sort of winning by losing outcome. Scattering top performers in the GSAT examinations throughout the various high schools is not an implementable solution, even if it would produce desirable results.
For one thing, it presupposes that those to be most adversely affected would permit its implementation. Hardly, given that those are the wealthy and those otherwise having the wherewithal to derail a solution that asks their children to sacrifice.
But hinting at such an extreme solution draws attention to the problem and may make it easier to gain acceptance for less radical, but still substantive, actions.
So are there initiatives that can be undertaken to tackle the deficiencies that exist in our education system? Yes, there are.
To get to these, however, people are going to have to be willing to spend more than a week at a time thinking about perhaps the single most pressing issue of our day. Jamaica, it's time for education to be given the attention it deserves.
I am, etc.,
SHELDON L. LYN
sllyn@yahoo.com
Via Go-Jamaica
