By Paul A. Reid, Staff Reporter 
Jodian Brown, upper sixth form student at Frome Technical High School in Westmoreland, pins a corsage on Prime Minister P.J. Patterson at Thursday's official opening of the school. - Paul Reid Photo
WESTERN BUREAU:
PRIME MINISTER P.J. Patterson has announced that the government will shortly be introducing an e-learning project to assist with the delivery of education.
Mr Patterson said the government has realised the importance of moving education into the computer age and that the project will be a multi-agency one, "driven by the Ministry of Industry, Technology and Commerce but anchored in the Ministry of Education Youth and Culture."
The prime minister made the announcement at Thursday's official opening of the Frome Technical High School in Westmoreland, adding that the teachers would have to be upgraded "because they will not be comfortable trying to transmit knowledge in a field in which the students are more adept and more advanced than they are."
Frome Technical is the first of 17 schools that are slated to be constructed in western Jamaica under the $3.5 billion North West Jamaica Schools project and was built at a cost of $285 million. An additional $15 million was spent in purchasing furniture for the school that has a capacity for 1,400 students in 19 classrooms.
Frome Technical is a replacement school after they out grew the original campus a few miles from the new one.
THING OF THE PAST
On Thursday Mr. Patterson said the days of chalk and blackboard are fast disappearing and a decision was taken at the last Cabinet retreat, "that education has to have a greater component of technology because soon if you leave school and you don't know how to use a computer you are going to be classified as an illiterate and you will not be able to be engaged meaningfully in any field of professional advancement."
To facilitate what he describes as a "revolution", the prime minister said the Ministry of Education itself would "have to be properly equipped with the tools to properly manage the education sector. So it has to be on the cutting edge of technologically efficient ministries."
To get the teachers ready for the implementation of the new system, the prime minister said the government would have to put the necessary infrastructure in place to ensure the system worked. "We have to make sure our teachers have adequate instructional material which can be readily available and we need to standardise it and be able to impart it to the students," he said. "We have to increase the level of skills among teachers in the use of modern technologies such as interactive software and in teaching of those things that are hard to grasp topics."
Among the benefits of the e-learning process the prime minister said is that it would "assist with remedial programme at the Grade seven level to enable students to cope more easily with high school work, especially among those schools which have duly been upgraded to high school status and we have to create a standard system
of accessing the performance of students, teachers and schools."
