Madness, madness, madness

Jul 04, 2010 Features / Columnists, My Column

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By Adam Harris

This past week the focus was on education and the achievements of those children who are about to begin their secondary education. The entire country was focused on the performance of the 16,000 children, some of whom should never have even written the examinations. And this is not because of a reason to deny any child the right to an education.
I had cause to criticize what passes for teaching at the lower level of the school. I noticed that in some schools there were people who should never have been close to a classroom because their academic level and their skill were almost non-existent.
These people would frown but I hasten to direct them to the way they speak with their wards. A teacher at school should always speak to their children in a manner they would want these children to replicate. Instead, I have heard the most vulgar dialect being spoken both in the classroom and on the playgrounds by these teachers to their children.
It is small wonder that barely thirty per cent of the children pass English at the most basic level. It is the same with the other subject areas and because of this I asked that the Education Ministry rethink its placement of teachers in primary schools. I also advocated the return of retired teachers who, despite their age, have more knowledge and skills that their replacements.
But there is more to this drive to see children educated and it starts in the home. Indeed there are parents who send their children to lessons where they are drilled and drilled for an examination. Many burn out because there is no joy in watching words and figures almost all through one’s growing up years.
There is often no explanation for doing some things because the teachers just do not have time to make learning fun, at least in their book. The older teachers knew how to do this. In fact, it was one of the success stories in the Grade Six Assessment, Wilfred Success, who agreed with me that critical thinking went through the door a long time ago.
When I was at school I was forced to reason things out. I was forced to question things; I was forced to identify examples and parallels. This is not the case today. It is almost all about rote and memory. This is not helping many because not everyone has the capacity to commit things to memory.
The school seems not to be going anywhere. Play, an integral part of learning, is being ignored and we wonder why the West Indies are doing so badly on the world state in the area of cricket. We wonder at the decline in social skills and the increase in bad manners. We wonder at the establishment of gangs and the diminished use of playgrounds.
But what about fathers? Increasingly men are missing from the home. They used to be the anchor, the people who kept children in check and who provided the needed security. They were the voice that caused children to buckle down when they wanted to slip. Men are missing.
Friday night, I was exposed to just one case of a missing man. A woman was frustrated to the point of contemplating suicide. Hers was the case of having her husband walking out of the home and leaving her with three children and not caring how she or the children supported themselves.
This woman moved to the courts and managed to get $2,000 a week for each of her three children and $1,000 for herself. This is nothing much and the woman, knowing how much more her husband makes, could not understand what appeared to be the callous nature of the magistrate who handed down her decision.
People wonder at the number of young men who now roam the streets. Each of these children, when asked about their father would remark that they do not know where he is. It is not by accident that the people who flock the Education Ministry are women; it is not by accident that the people who visit the inmates in prison are the women; it is not by accident that the people who attend parent-teacher meetings are women.
There is more. When a teacher tells a child to bring his or her parent, (and teachers these days tell children to bring their mother) a woman turns up. Men have all but disappeared. Gone are the days when they were the bulk of teachers in secondary schools and provided role models.
In my days at school, all the schools I attended had men and heads. At Queen’s College there were three female teachers, Ada Akai who taught Geography, Lynette Dolphin who taught music, and Sylvia Carew who taught English. At some time there was another woman English teacher, a Miss Loncke whose first name eludes me at this point. It could have been Sylvia too.
I insist that if we do not take back certain things then we would be doomed. And it is not that there are too many options for men. The jobs are diminishing and we seem to be attracting more police action than necessary.
And as if to make matters even worse, the Education Ministry is shutting down schools in areas where they are needed. St Mary’s in Brickdam has been closed and President’s College has been reduced to a dormitory. Madness prevails.

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