Delroy Chuck WHILE WE lament the mounting crises in the economy, the escalating crime and violence, the injustice and insecurity, the abuses of human rights and dignity, the inadequate and deteriorating housing stock, the decaying and awful road surfaces, the pitiful shortages in the hospitals, and one could go on, we cannot ignore the greatest crisis of all the failure to properly develop our human capital. When so many students fail and perform below expectation, something is awfully wrong.
Our children are being short-changed and ill-prepared to compete with the rest of the world. I need not repeat the levels of passes in the GSAT, CXC, and A'Levels, save and except to say that less than 10 per cent of our students who should be sitting these exams get acceptable levels of passes. If the results of the GSAT exams were published, and they should be, the nation would feel ashamed. My understanding is that the vast majority of students are getting grades which suggest they are barely literate and numerate. Put another way, at any age cohort, more than 80 per cent of our students are underperforming and definitely not meeting acceptable standards on any academic measure.
Interestingly, the top five per cent of our students are shining quite brightly and, in spite of our education system, are doing quite well. Our best students compare, perform and compete with the best in the world, at Harvard and Oxford, or at any university here or abroad. The real problem is that our schools are not assisting students to perform at a high level. And, I daresay, it is not the fault of the students, as any investigation will demonstrate. In fact, nowadays, extra lessons and commercial academic institutions are assisting students to get more passes and better grades. At the CXC level, while some of our students are getting the top prizes, overall the country is performing at the bottom compared with other Caribbean nations; only Guyana is worse.
GOOD UNIVERSITY RESULTS
Another interesting comparison is to determine the level of A'Level passes for students entering the University of the West Indies and the quality of their degrees when they graduate. In most faculties, if students across the Caribbean were allowed in only on merit, Jamaican students would struggle to get into any faculty, especially the professional faculties of Law and Medicine. Certainly, during my days as a UWI Law lecturer, students from Barbados, Trinidad, St. Lucia, etc. were unable to get into Law unless they had three A'Levels and usually at Grade A, while many Jamaicans entered even without a Grade A in any of their A'Level passes. Amazingly, my experience in 20 years of teaching at the university is that the Jamaican students performed as well, or better, than their Caribbean counterparts who entered with better A'Levels.
In fact, even now, Jamaican students who enter UWI with poor A'Level passes are getting good Upper Second and First Class degrees. Unless I can be shown otherwise, my conclusion is that Jamaican students can perform equally well with other students from the Caribbean, given the right curricula, facilities and quality of teaching. Indeed, with a limited sample, I see similar results of Jamaican students who enter universities in Canada and the United States, who performed badly in schools here but picked up remarkably once they enter university.
I am happy, therefore, to hear the Prime Minister, P.J. Patterson, in his New Year's broadcast, acknowledging the poor performance of our students and setting up a committee to examine why our students are performing so badly. Yet, I am not too sanguine that this government will extricate our students, schools and the whole education system from the unholy mess. This government, in its 14 years and more in office, has not brought anything new to improve education. The National Assess-ment Programme (NAP) and the Reform of Secondary Education (ROSE), which the government has been implementing, slowly and incompetently, were policy initiatives, extracted from the Social Well-being Programme, of the JLP.
SEAGA'S CONTRIBUTION
Indeed, even the recent historic parliamentary agreement on education between the Opposition and the Government, emerged from the motion, creativity and determination of the Leader of the Opposition, Edward Seaga. As a party to the negotiation and settlement, I can say that without Seaga's vision and insistence there would be no specific targets, insufficient attention to details and nothing worth agreeing on. Now, the government has been given an education programme, which if properly implemented, can lift the education system.
Sadly, I am again not sanguine that anything will be achieved, as the government's greatest problem is its inability to implement any solution, to use any good idea or to succeed with any policy directive.
I am convinced that even before anything new can be achieved the whole education system needs an overhaul. It can begin with a proper implementation of the NAP, which should be used to assess failing teachers and schools. Some teachers should not be near any educational institution. It is not only their poor academic qualification but also their poor demeanour and attitudes that are more likely to cause students to hate instead of to love learning. In truth, the Prime Minister's Committee on Education will have an unenviable task, as they will simply have to start from scratch, to dismantle and rebuild the education system, if anything worthwhile is to be achieved.
Delroy Chuck is an
attorney-at-law and Opposition Member of Parliament. He
can be contacted by e-mail
at delchuck@hotmail.com.
