Hilary Robertson-Hickling
PROFESSOR TREVOR MUNROE was recently quoted as saying that there was need to increase the levels of on-the-job training as too many Jamaicans had neither passes at external exams nor on-the-job training. The signing of the new Memorandum of Understanding highlights the need to upgrade the staff of the public service for both personal and national development.
All of this comes as the academic year draws to a close, and what a year it has been - increased violence in schools, little improvement in the performance of students and a country waiting to exhale about the transformation of the educational system. From the basic school to the universities, it's clearly time for us to develop new policies and practices. I have learnt of the excellent work done by the Centre for Excellence led by Professor Errol Miller and hope that the model will be widely utilised to increase the levels of literacy and numeracy of those among our students who are underperforming.
In our prisons and other penal institutions we must also break the cycle of ignorance and poverty which condemns promising young men to a life of hopelessness and despair. I hope that many more innovative programmes like the computer programme will be implemented in the prison. Centuries of undervelopment in this country have yielded the bitter harvest of a population which is mainly undereducated in the age of the knowledge economy. A farm worker to Canada today must be literate and able to utilise computerised irrigation systems, so all of us have to function at higher levels.
Another excellent initiative was the Caribbean Conference on Information Systems at UWI which brought local and international scholars, students and businesspeople together to address the issues which would result in the improvement of business processes through the development of appropriate systems to utilise information technology in the public and private sectors. Hopefully the findings of this conference will be shared with the public and the recommendations implemented.
At this time, St. Andrew High School for Girls has been celebrating its 75th anniversary and has been examining its past while planning to address the present needs of the students and staff as well as the country. I hope that the deliberations will be made public as one of the issues faced by the country is that there are many centres of excellence but their experience is not being disseminated and employed to raise standards across the country. All of our institutions have to contribute to the innovation and problem solving that Jamaica requires. There need to be more partnerships across institutions and people who have demonstrated excellence in one sphere should be deployed elsewhere. This summer, camps and summer schools should be engaging many more young people than last year and our plans for the next school year have to be transformatory.
It is no longer possible for the minority to receive an excellent world-class education while the majority receives a low-quality education; everyone is suffering as a result. The church has led in the provision of education in the past but today it has to work with the Government and the private sector in a new way.
Hilary Robertson-Hickling is a lecturer in the Department of Management Studies at UWI, Mona.
