Bevar Moodie, the principal of José Marti Technical High School, clearly faces a problem if, as was reported by this newspaper yesterday, half of his grade seven students are reading significantly below their age and grade levels.

But this is not a problem only for Mr. Moodie and his school. For what it underlines, which we all have known for a long time, is the crisis in the education system, especially at the primary level. Up to a third of the children who pass through the primary system go on to the secondary level without reaching the requisite proficiency in reading and math.

This is not a problem to be fixed only, or primarily, by head teachers like Mr. Moodie or the schools they operate. Indeed, a complex set of social and economic issues contributes to this crisis in education. Fixing the problems will, of course, demand significant additional resources, such as the additional $20 billion a year which the education task force says must be spent on education.

The fix will also demand much hard work, and significant creativity, on the part of teachers. Which is where we take issue with José Marti's Mr. Moodie in part of his response to the problem he faces. We believe that the mindset of teachers is translated into behaviour towards their students. If that mindset is negative, negative attitudes are reinforced.

So, it gives us cause for concern when Mr. Moodie not only expresses shock at the reading level of some of the students sent to his school, but declares that some of them "do not show the capability or aptitude for learning." No matter how difficult their circumstance, we find it hard to almost dismiss any child of age 11 or 12 as also incapable of learning.

What we would have preferred to hear from Mr. Moodie is that having inherited a difficult situation and even with a shortage of facilities, he was leading José Marti's teachers in creative, new approaches to deal with this crisis. Perhaps he might have told us how he planned to engage his catchment community and the parents of these students in the search for solutions. He might have enlightened us about new and even not-so-novel initiatives to reach students who, according to the principal, "are really in a bad way and ... cannot listen and sit still and follow instructions."

It seems to us that these are circumstances that demand the use of the full range of skills taught at teachers' college.

The point is that the delivery of education is not defined only by the availability of classrooms or the poor quality of the 'product' with which teachers have to work, although no one wishes to totally discount these issues. But there is a role for vision and creativity, which we hope to see at José Marti, rather than negative reinforcement.

But creative vision is not only the responsibility of teachers in the classrooms. It must spring too at the level of policymakers, especially when faced with a crisis such as confronts us in Jamaica.

In that regard, we believe that our education intervention must be by any means necessary, all means possible. In other words, there has to be a national mobilisation around education.