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An experiment gone horribly wrong

Feb 17, 2014 Editorial

The student has not learnt if the teacher has not taught is an old axiom that once floated around the many classrooms in the country. The message was that when children fail it is because the teacher taught them nothing.
Many of us grew up firmly believing this and as teachers we made sure that the vast majority of our students pass. Those were not the days when teachers padded results because at any time the children’s results could be checked by someone visiting from the Ministry of Education.
Back then, too, examination results were kept for at least five years. They were wrapped and placed in cupboards so that they could be inspected at any time in the future. In these days of the electronic media, one may come to believe that there may be other means of assessing teachers, and perhaps there are.
However, for all the good intentions, it would take an entirely different system to assess the teachers at the Georgetown School of Nursing. The headlines screamed that a mere 15 per cent of the Professional Nurses, who wrote the examinations, passed. Without wishing to be redundant, one could only say that the vast or the overwhelming majority failed.
For some time now, Teachers at the tertiary level have been complaining that the people they receive should never even qualify for the Secondary Level. And the officials at the Education Ministry agree that people leave the Primary Level unable to read. This is what has hit the Nursing profession, but all the blame is not on the quality of the Trainees.
Nearly five years ago when the then Minister of Health Dr. Leslie Ramsammy was asked about the disappearance of the Professional Nurses to other countries in chase of better remuneration, he simply said that we would train many more to compensate for those who leave. What he was saying was that we would train, let us say, 50 so that if twenty-five of them should leave then we would still have twenty-five. Easier said than done.
He loaded the school to the extent that there was just not enough room for the Trainee Nurses. He even said that empty rooms in the hospital would be utilized. He even suggested that in addition to the Tutors at the School of Nursing, there would be the Doctors in the system who would be used as Tutors.
Administrators know that teaching and lecturing is an art, so it was wishful thinking to believe that the Doctors would have been ready and able teachers.  In the end it was left to the Lecturers employed by the School of Nursing to train the vast numbers—an impossible task. Initially the Lecturers complained but those complaints fell on deaf ears.
Perhaps the goodly Doctor could explain how the Tutors at the school would be able to give the kind of attention needed to the slower pupils, how they could afford individual attention when needed. The results show that the exercise introduced by Dr. Ramsammy is a massive failure. It is more than a reflection on a school; it is a setback for the girls and boys who wanted to be a part of the medical profession. Many of them are devastated and probably feel worse than useless.
The glaring fact is that the Ramsammy’s experiment failed from the start. Every examination has been producing the kind of results that are now being recorded but there was no effort to cancel the experiment.
The truth is that our nurses and other skilled people would leave once the government fails to offer proper remuneration. It has been the same in the teaching profession and there was an effort to expand the classes. The authorities actually lowered the qualification but as soon as they saw that the experiment was failing, they cancelled it.
Now the Georgetown School of Nursing has this blemish on the Lecturers because the impression is that they are not teaching. So in addition to the failed students feeling hopeless, we now have the Lecturers feeling the same way.

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