THE DILAPIDATED condition of the Ministry of Education building at Heroes' Circle which the Minister, Maxine Henry-Wilson, has pledged to rehabilitate, reflects the state of education in Jamaica, if Dr. Ralph Thompson's cogent analysis of the 2003 CXC exam results in English and Mathematics are anything to go by.
He quite correctly, in our view, calculates the CXC pass rate, not as a percentage of those students permitted by school principals to sit the exam, but as the percentage of the total student cohort whose education to an acceptable standard should be non-negotiable.
For too long the appalling state of our education apparatus has been shielded from public scrutiny by a kind of statistical legerdemain which masks the degree and focus of the problem by lumping together the good results of traditional secondary schools with the disastrous results of the non-traditional secondary schools, thus producing a misleading overall average.
The National Council on Education (NCE) has now disaggregated the results and what emerges from the Thompson analysis of them is that about 80 per cent of the total secondary school population, mostly children of the poor, attend non-traditional secondary schools. The 2003 CXC pass rates in these non-traditional secondary schools are pitifully low nine per cent in English and four per cent in Maths. This means that 90 out of 100 of our young adults in the non-traditional secondary schools are under-educated, barely literate and numerate.
As a country, we must move swiftly to analyse and address the problems plaguing the education system. We cannot continue like this in the rapidly changing environment of the 21st century.
Let us accelerate the debate, let us put forward suggestions and proposals for consideration by Mrs. Henry-Wilson and her team at the Ministry of Education. We must fix the problem. While the state must play the lead role, education is too vital a matter to be left only to the politicians.
We congratulate the top 10 secondary schools consistently led by Campion College and Immaculate Conception High. We trust that nobody will be foolish enough to blame the success of these schools for the failure of others. This is not an issue of one-upmanship. The nation has now to realise that our education system is causing the frustration of human potential and this will develop a dangerous dynamic of its own. Dr. Thompson sees the solution in raising teaching standards and paying greater attention to early childhood education. His initiatives in this regard should not be allowed to falter.
