Education has become a victim of the widening gap between the rich and the poor

Aug 20, 2013 Letters

Dear Editor
As is to be expected, the government has tried to put the best spin on the recent CXC results. No doubt, those students who excelled along with the teachers at those schools that did well should be commended. But the results show clearly that despite some excellent individual performances our children as a group continue to under-perform. This is cause for great concern. If 7 out of ten students cannot pass Math, six out of ten cannot pass English and 4 out of ten cannot pass with top grades, then we have a national disaster on our hands.
It is difficult to pinpoint any single cause of this problem. But certainly governance must be high up on that list. It is at that level that national priorities are decided. It is there where the decision on how much resources are expended on education and how those resources are used. In short we are found wanting at the level of vision and policy.
A second cause of our poor results to my mind has to do with the way in which education has become a victim of the widening gap between the rich and the poor. It seems even with the naked eye that the results would reveal that the students who do well tend to be those whose parents are able afford extra lessons in a consistent manner and those who do the least well are those who do not have the same opportunities. And that class polarization in some instances, though not across the board, has an ethnic look to it. As David Granger observed, we have developed a kind of social apartheid in education that is reflected in the results. And that filters into the wider society. Allied to the second cause is the inability of poor parents and poor communities to offer the kind of supplementary assistance and guidance to the children. The recycling of poverty therefore is one of the major contributing causes of the problem. Poor people who have hustle and or work several jobs to make ends meet obviously do not have the time to oversee and monitor the children progress. Allied to that is the decline of the communities as spaces of collective pride, dignity, culture and learning. Education is no longer projected as the gateway to individual and collective overcoming.
Finally, the recycling of the mediocrity that comes out of the school system has implications for the preparation of future groups of students. We recruit some of our teachers from the same pool of under-prepared students and push them into the teaching system without the necessary training needed to close the gap that they bring with them from the school system.
Our politicians tell us how much we need Hydroelectricity and some have declared a period of mourning for the seemingly faltering Amaila Project. But even if we can get the best Hydro project in the world, if we do not pay the same attention to and expend more resources on properly educating our young people, we are going nowhere positive as a nation.
An uneducated nation can never be a productive nation. Education or lack of it has implications for the economy, for cultural uplifment and for social development. It is from this underprepared group of young people that we recruit our teachers, policemen and women and soldiers—those who are tasked with educating the next generation and with maintaining law and order. Those
tears which are being shed for Amaila should be shed for Education. The centrality of Hydroelectricity should be coupled with the centrality of Education Overhaul.
David Hinds

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Education has become a victim of the widening gap between the rich and the poor

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