EDITOR: I would like to forward an appeal to the Ministry of Education to initiate an honorary gala to host the students who have returned such stellar distinctions in the CAPE, CSEC and CPEA examinations, the likes of which continue to boggle the mind year after year.

We must acknowledge them. We must altogether rally around the products of our own education system and bask in the glow of some of the brightest beams ever birthed from the bowels of this nation and speak into their collective ear, the encouragement and passion, the praise and the patriotic pride with which they ought to be bestowed.

They are no lesser architects. For it is they, within whose hands the shape of this nation will be molded, for your progeny and mine, for our people and posterity. They have done us proud.

Let us embrace them. Let us do more than simply cite their names and accomplishments as a news item, or shout well-intentioned congratulations and thank you from behind closed doors. But let us heap praise and inspiration upon them, if only for one brilliant evening, that the lights in the celestial constellation above us may witness with awe the pride we take in our own.

Rodcliff Noel