In recent weeks the leaders and acolytes of the governing People's National Party and the Jamaica Labour Party have stomped the country, delivering lively speeches and whipping supporters into zealous frenzy. It is all with the aim of winning state power in the general election scheduled for August 27.

While the political temperature has risen, not much else of substantial value has happened. Certainly, there has not been much light. The gauge, unfortunately, is being driven up by so much hot air. When, in the fashion of Donald Buchanan, the People's National Party's general secretary, they are not being banal and puerile, calling people devils and liars, they tend to speak in sound bites, offering little substance.

From the perspective of the parties, this approach is entirely appropriate, a consciously cynical act. The assumption is: do not confuse the voters with facts and serious information lest that be held against you as performance criteria.

It is when viewed from this perspective that it makes sense that the parties have not yet issued their manifestos, outlining their specific performance pledges. These documents will be released late in the campaign when, the political leaders hope, there will be too little time for the people who do such things to focus on the documents seriously and ask potentially discomfiting questions. Or, if the questions are asked, that they will be drowned out by the frenzy of the time.

Education, for instance, is one critical area of national life about which both parties have talked much, but with great cynicism. They have largely played to emotion, rather than engaging in serious debate on a sector that faces deep crisis. Indeed, the problems are widely known, oft repeated by this newspaper: the mere third of the students who pass math at Caribbean Examination Council and the nearly 40 per cent who fail English. Only a handful scrape together passes in five subjects at a single sitting. But these data mask something abysmally worse, for they account for only those students who actually take the exams rather than the entire cohort, a great bulk of whom are screened out of the tests or never had the opportunity in the first place.

The Opposition Jamaica Labour Party has promised to provide 'free education' at the secondary level, which the Government says is unaffordable. But few are clear on precisely what is being priced when costs are talked about: the entire bill for delivering education at the secondary level or the net incremental cost to offset the portion that parents now pay for secondary students? Nor is there a discussion on whether 'free education' at the secondary level will improve access, in a sector where enrolment is already well over 80 per cent; or whether the focus should be on quality education. What should that quality be, and how is it to be judged?

Other issues to be addressed in this education debate is where and how an administration should place emphasis. There seems now to be a consensus that early childhood education demands great attention and a government commission is working through training and regulatory arrangements for a sector of the education system that is largely community-based and private-sector controlled, and which is severely underfunded. Should there be a reallocation of resources? It's time to talk in more than sound bites.