I agree ‘we need to avoid that which pollutes the essence of childhood’

Nov 07, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
When a people have a mindset, are steeped in ways, then no matter how much preaching is done in their interest about the virtue or danger of a thing, it will still be to no avail or as old folks would say, “is like throwing water on duck back”.
Extra lesson for children, to the overwhelming majority of parents/guardians is a sine qua non which they believe in like a religion and will not listen to anything from anyone against it – not even Christ!
They see within it a golden future on the horizon for their children, thus the obsession with extra lessons.
And so the erudite Sunday columnist Mr. Ian McDonald, who has been forever preaching, admonishing and imploring us about the subtle, latent and possibly irreparable damage that can be done to our children by the shackles of extra lessons when overdone, still remains a voice in the wilderness.
A few weeks back it was Mr. Laurie Lewis, who in a terse letter (SN August 16th) under the caption, “It would be better if our students sat no more than 10 subjects at CSEC”, appeal to both the education Ministry and parents to lessen the burden on our children; “to stop this rat race now!”, “let us end this madness now!” of pushing students day and night to capture 15 subjects, denying them an important part of their lives.
Says Mr. Lewis, “but I rather suspect that in terms of human development we are damaging these children”.
Then came another writer Mr. George Munroe under the headline, “We overplay the role of some groups and underplay others” (SN Thursday, September 167i); a clever, frank and factual presentation lambasting our antiquated, regimented and inept system/custom that keeps us hemmed in and ridiculously narrow-minded in our outlook and judgment.
Moving beyond the realm of extra lessons and excessive subjects, Munroe pointed out other negatives which our society/educational system are fostering; the misplaced and false values that a craftsman was a degrading/inferior function to one in the field of “law and medicine”, along with other foolish reasoning in determining levels and standards of acceptability, of “the impertinent and fallacious implication……that farmers were also high school dropouts…..several degrees outside the boundary of acceptable society and therefore of no consequence”; of the guilt feelings inherent in the conditioning process our society imposes on us of, “the intellectual shackles suffusing our individualism and potential”.
But Mr. McDonald in “the legacy of Thomas Gradgrind” prodded our minds, he has over and again expressed reverential like interest in the mind of a child; the infinite creative potentials waiting to explode, and has been steadfast in banging against this extra lesson craze for a mighty long time, the discarding of which has now become his trumpet call.
Extra lessons have indeed, as some have stated. can accurately be seen as an abomination in some instances where teachers hardly do their regular teaching assignment, preferring to do so with the lessons; slow ones who cannot afford to pay are totally neglected; I have even seen some extra lesson classes so large that they have to be divided, and for 3-4 sometimes 5 days a week!…..But a good wager also is that what happens during normal school sessions is the same that goes on with extra lessons as regards slow and quick learners; no special care is given to those slow on the uptake.
Thus most extra lessons classes fail to provide any meaningful help to plodders. In the war for P.0 and Q.C. just why are people still so hooked on the specious assertion that these two schools are the sole authentic bedrock and embodiment of sound education, hence the end of the world for a 11-12-year-old who fails to grab a place…..We can only hope that one day parents/guardians will come to realise the damage that can come about when their desire and their children’s dream are not in harmony. I recall a story I read sometime back – think it was ‘The other side of midnight’.
Kate Blackwell became the inheritor of a gold industry and wanted for her son, in time, to head, but he wanted instead to become an artist/painter which was his passion and which she damned, since according to her the gold empire was all that mattered, as there are endless people who can paint; ‘I have better uses for him’.
So she granted him his wish by “playing him”; sent him to art school in France; arranged for him an exhibition at a prominent art gallery and paid an eminent critic to tear him to threads. So crafty was Kate Blackwell that, even when he (her son) thought that it was through his courtship he won his girlfriend who shares his apartment, he was hoodwink, his mother arranged it.
He was so devastated that he lost his mind and ended up in a mental asylum and she was heartbroken.
And so I am all along with Mr. McDonald when he writes so feelingly that “we need to avoid that which pollutes the essence of childhood……..The child must be given room enough and time to work out a child’s destiny, before he/she graduates to tackling challenges and enduring the trials of another stag.
So true, yet it remains a tall order for the Ministry to check and where parents are concern, “stick break in deh ears, you can preach like Paul”, talking to convince them is like talking to the dead, and this I think Mr. McDonald knows so well deep down inside, the very reason why he states, “Extra lessons now seems irremovable rooted in our educational system. Even when they are no longer required they are still imposed”.
Frank Fyffe

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