Failing our youths

Jul 09, 2008 Editorial

The report carried in our yesterday’s edition shocked many: “Some thirty-odd students of the Ann’s Grove Community High School have reportedly been asked not to return to school for the new school term… because they failed their end-of-term examination twice.”

It should not have: it was an inevitable consequence of the orientation of our educational system that we critiqued in our editorial of last week, “Rite of passage”.

Contrary to the stated goal of the administration that we would not have an elitist school system that just focused on the top one percent of the seventeen thousand students that annually write the Sixth-grade Assessment Test, unfortunately not much has changed.

Ann’s Grove Community High is just the tip of the iceberg and the situation only received prominence because the headmaster decided not to readmit the students.

One parent pointed out, “In the past, even if students failed twice, they were allowed to continue attending the school until they were of age to leave.” Education, then, to thousands and thousands of our young people who were at the ‘bottom” of the Sixth-grade Assessment Test lists, means just whiling away their time in schools that are merely holding pens.

As we wrote in the Editorial, “The unfortunate result of the announced results every year is that at least the “lowest” five thousand or so will be stigmatised for the remainder of their lives in the educational system as not having what it takes to be “successful”.

Even though we do not explicitly tell the students that they are “failures”, the crowing and publicity given to the “thoroughbreds” send that message. The disparity in spending on the dozen or so elite schools is astounding and sends the same message even more forcefully: the outlay on President’s College alone exceeds the budget of all the Community High Schools across the country.

We therefore have a situation where the students who need the most help, assistance and guidance, receive the dregs of the education barrel. We should give praise that only one dropout (“Skinny”) of the Community High School system has gained such criminal notoriety.

But then again, who has checked the background of the other “bad-boys? They are just “failures”.
There is no question that this administration has increased the spending on education, but we have to question if the spending has been as targeted to our needs as rigorously as it ought to have been. Even with the “elite” schools, we have had to point out that the incentives or facilities to study science –especially physics, which has to be the core of any educational program to prepare those students to contribute to our national development – has been lagging.

In the remainder of the schools we have to deal with the reality that the system for producing “thoroughbreds” focused only on one facet of “intelligence” and that the students on the other side of the scale may have other abilities that are even more important to the nation’s well-being.

We have to find ways to harness those talents so that not only the nation benefits but also those unfortunate youths who are being programmed to believe that they are “failures” and who will eventually rebel against that stigmatisation in one way or the other.

Some have spoken of reviving the National Service but that was for youths who had already passed through the “school mill” of inculcating failure.

One way to go may be to revive the old schemes of apprenticing young people of school age to local tradesmen and businesses. This was the route that most tradesmen travelled up to the first half of the last century.

The schools could work in tandem with the businesses, in covering respectively, the theoretical and practical aspects of the trade, for youths who show aptitude for specific skills. The businesses could be recompensed for their contribution by being allowed to deduct stipulated sums from their taxes.

We face a very volatile situation but the youths are not the problem: they simply have a problem. And the systems of our society and economy play a role in precipitating that problem. There are other initiatives that other agencies can deal with but the educational system is a critical intervention point. The youths are already socialised into accepting its contributions; let us not literally “blow it”.

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Failing our youths

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