IN OUR Letter of the Day on the page opposite a reader from Green Island, Hanover addresses what is seen as severe problems in education still not addressed by Ministers past and present.
A striking feature of the letter describes students at a secondary high school breaking in disarray from lines of assembly in a stampede for chairs in the classrooms! There was actually a fight between a boy and a girl over a chair.
The incident dramatises a perennial problem of the provision of adequate furniture for schools particularly at the start of a new school year. Elsewhere in today's edition there is a report that after some two months of the start of the school year some schools in the inner city communities of Kingston are yet to receive supplies promised by the Ministry of Education.
A Ministry official said delivery of furniture had been ongoing since school started but he was unclear about the number of schools served.
While we have saluted the recent parliamentary consensus between Government and Opposition on the way forward as far as financing education is concerned we cannot ignore the current obstacles in the system. For the central purpose is to educate the young people who are literally the future of the nation.
If basics such as desks and chairs have not been supplied to some sections of the capital city, as well as Hanover in the west chances are that other rural parishes are similarly short-changed.
Our Hanover reader's school was built to accommodate 750 students, but now has 1730 on two shifts. While this suggests that the chair shortage may be linked to the original accommodation plan, that is hardly likely as the school administrators must have made adjustments to cope with population expansion.
They now have to install preventive measures against fighting over chairs. This surely is an SOS call to the Ministry of Education.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
