Education – A call for serious reflection

The St. Vincent and the Grenadines Community College has over the past year been presenting a series of lectures that have been very informative, thought provoking and interesting and have presented an opportunity for this country to reflect on some of the issues raised, since they have implications for nation building.

One of these lectures I want to highlight is the one delivered by Professor Hazel Simmons-McDonald, Principal of the University of the West Indies Open Campus.{{more}}

Professor Simmons-McDonald’s lecture was entitled “Education for Capacity Building and Regional Sustainability.” Unfortunately, apart from persons associated with the College, not many persons involved in Education attended that lecture. Although her focus was on the region, all of the issues raised were of significance to SVG. The lecture, I felt, presented a serious opportunity for us to begin some reflection on what is happening with education. As happens all the time, these lectures, like others, attract some attention and provoke discussion at the time of delivery, but everything ends there.

Over the years, we have been so caught up with talk of an ‘Education Revolution’ that we have conveyed the impression that all is well with that sector and have neglected identifying the faults that lie within and the challenges it continues to face. Talk of a revolution in Education has mainly to do with our achievement of universal secondary education, CARICOM having set the year 2005 for its implementation. We rushed headlong into achieving that goal without putting in place some of the measures and structures necessary to make it meaningful and effective. It was only after we boasted of having achieved that goal that we began to rush to put in place measures to sustain it. But where is the revolution?

What I am attempting to do here is to pull out from her lecture some of the issues I consider relevant to SVG. These have to do mainly with current realities in the system and some of the challenges and gaps. What she had done was to look at the ‘entire continuum of education’, that is, starting with early childhood, moving to tertiary education and then examining the issue of lifelong learning. Really any serious look at education has to involve an examination of the continuum since the levels are all interrelated and shortcomings at one level will inevitably affect the other levels. When we look at education in this way, we recognise immediately one of the serious challenges we face. We have moved along toward universal secondary education but have been focussing on tertiary level education, doing a lot of work at and with the Community College. Common Entrance Examinations continue at the Primary Level but serve mainly to determine who gets to the more prestigious schools. In fact Simmons-McDonald states that “Common Entrance Examinations (where they still exist)… show a poor record for learning and teaching at the primary level…Achieving the Millennium

Development Goal of universal primary education must mean more than shuffling learners through the system without thought as to whether they have acquired basic literacy and numeracy skills that they need to be successful in higher grades.”

It is my view that education at the secondary level suffers from the poor quality of primary education, with students getting into that level without having ‘acquired basic literacy and numeracy skills’. This in turn affects Tertiary Education. The University of the West Indies has for some time now been drawing attention to the poor state of English and Mathematics, many of the students having not mastered basic literacy and numeracy skills.

Simmons-McDonald also drew attention to CSEC 2009 results that indicated that 25 percent of students attained passes in at least 5 subjects while 28 percent received no passes. There was also a comment about the June 2010 results from CXC Registrar Dr. Didacus Jules that, “Of the students who complete the secondary cycle in the CARICOM countries, only approximately 30 percent qualify to receive certification which would enable them to gain admission to a tertiary level institution…Students show severe deficiencies in mathematics. On average, approximately 35 percent receive an acceptable grade.”

There is then the issue of early childhood education which, particularly for children below five, is very disorganised and is in the hands of private operators, some of them but not all doing excellent work. I want to emphasize the point here that until we begin to pay more serious attention to pre-schools and early childhood education generally, all the other levels are going to suffer. Unless we see and treat education as a continuum that starts with early childhood and moves to tertiary level we will continue to have gross deficiencies in the system. At the same time the issue of lifelong learning has implications for survival in a highly technological global environment (To be continued)

(Please send comments to fraser.adrian@gmail.com)

Dr Adrian Fraser is a social commentator and historian.