13 July 2000, 808 words
Of all the wrong, unethical, or simply dotish things the UNC regime has done - from Indian rice deals, to telling fanatic supporters to do dem first, to INNCogen contracts, to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on overpriced airport expansions, beauty pageants, illegal Savannah and undone highway pavings, to attacking the Chief Justice to Clause Seven - of all these things, none may have more dire consequences for our society than this Government's recent education ploy.
And ploy it is, not a plan. If it was a plan, I'd support it whole-heartedly. Secondary school places for all children is both desirable and necessary. But such a plan would take between three to ten years to properly implement and, like I say, this Government has nothing in its cabinet but a ploy.
I know this because no Government that was truly committed to educational improvement would have appointed an incompetent like Adesh Nanan as Education Minister (let alone have kept him in that position for nearly four years). Moreover, if the Panday administration was really serious about universal secondary education, they would have started setting it up from the moment they took office.
Instead, they are willing to commit child abuse so that they can have a nice election slogan. Education Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar can deny this all she likes, but she has already demonstrated her capacity for deception and demagoguery. When, at a joint press conference, TTUTA president Trevor Oliver accused the Education Ministry of watering down education on the altar of political expediency, Persad-Bissessar termed his words an insult to the principals who had been consulted on the "plan".
Lo and behold, a few days later both the primary and secondary school principals associations stated their opposition to the ploy. Not one of them has yet mentioned being consulted. Nor must we forget Persad-Bissessar's disingenuous statement that nobody would be "forced" to take up the extra secondary school places, which reveals her willingness to take advantage of people's desperation and ignorance.
On paper, all the children who wrote the Common Entrance exam have been placed. And many uneducated parents are ecstatic. So would they be, too, if the Government decided to print extra money and give it away. They wouldn't understand the dire consequences of that, and they don't understand the possibly worse consequences of this placings ploy.
The psychologist Judith Harris, author of <I>The Nurture Assumption<I>, has amassed evidence showing that children are socialized by their peer groups, not by their parents. "The strategies children work out at home for getting along with their parents and siblings are likely to be useless in the world outside their home," she writes. "That is why children's behaviour differs systematically in different social contexts."
The school environment is the main peer environment which children inhabit for their formative years. All these extra children are going to place additional stress on an already shaky educational system. They will not live up to the other children - they are more likely to drag them down. That is how the psychology of the mob functions. The difference with children is that trained, committed teachers can help shape classroom values.
But Harris's thesis explains how our education system has become a key - though not only - factor responsible for this country's high rate of violent crime today. The Williams PNM suffered from what educators call "the edifice complex", and the UNC is no different. Money that should be spent on curriculum development and teacher training, has instead been spent building buildings.
As a result, classroom cultures have been created where resentment, failure and frustration are the dominant peer values. And this situation, created by the PNM, will only be exacerbated by the UNC's secondary education ploy.
Even in developed countries, with their many social safety nets and booming economies, poor education systems create crime and other social problems. England, a country famed for its football hooligans and possessing the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe, has a 24 per cent illiteracy and innumeracy rate. The United States, with the highest rate of muggings, rapes and murders of all industrialized nations, also has the worst-performing students of any advanced country.
The connection between education and economic development is well-established. So is the connection between wide economic disparity (not poverty) and violent crime. If a country has a good education system, it improves the economy and also helps prevent the gap between the haves and have-nots from becoming too wide.
But a good education does not mean more schools or stuffing children into them. It means professionally trained teachers and a tested curriculum tied to the society's economic needs. Only then can we create an education system that will nurture, instead of abuse, our children. But the UNC isn't interested in that: there's no easy election slogan in it.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh