Latest update April 18th, 2025 8:12 AM
Educator looking to CXC to introduce ‘Caribbean Citizenship’
– could help to improve quality of life
Instead of deliberate focus on writing many subjects, which are not required for matriculation, students should be encouraged to focus more on human relations.
Dr. Kenneth Hunte
This is the belief of educator, Dr. Kenneth Hunte, who disclosed recently, “my dream is that CXC (the Caribbean Examinations Council) will wake up and stop expecting children to write 15 and 20 subjects or whatever number at CSEC (Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate examination).”
This is in light of the fact, Dr. Hunte said, that “you only need six subjects, including English and Mathematics Grades One to three, to get into UG (University of Guyana). So we don’t need to spend all the time doing those things. We need to spend more on ‘the person’,” he insisted.
It is his conviction that there is a dire need for more time to be spent on talking about “how we relate to our fellow human beings.”
For this reason, he expressed hope that one day CXC will decide to offer a subject that could possibly be called ‘Caribbean Citizenship’. With such a subject area in place, Dr. Hunte is convinced that a movement could be fostered, whereby all of the people of the Caribbean could work together to improve their quality of life.
Dr. Hunte is currently on a mission to help the education system realise its potential to work with people with a view of leading them down a path of a purposeful life.
In so doing, he has been working in collaboration with the Cyril Potter College of Education (CPCE) to conduct a pastoral care initiative. And according to Dr. Hunte, “we are relying on the young teachers to get into the classrooms”.
With guidance, he beliefs that these teachers will be able to rely on the affective domain to realise needful change in the society. The affective domain is part of a system that was published in 1965 for identifying, understanding and addressing how people learn.
Through the pastoral care initiative, Dr. Hunte is convinced that teachers will be in a better position to teach Personal and Social Development (PSD), “…because now you are going to understand about the affective domain you will be able to teach the PSD curriculum much, much more effectively,” said an optimistic Dr. Hunte.
He, however, noted that the teaching methodology will have to embrace some changes and “we are going to be asking teachers to do this. I’m sure CPCE is going to be doing the same thing. You can’t teach the affective domain by ‘chalk and talk’,” he insisted.
“It has to involve interaction in the classroom…you have got to talk about how you feel about these issues (that affect people and society) so that everybody can begin to understand. But it’s not just their lives that’s important; it’s everybody’s lives that are important,” said Dr. Hunte.
This therefore means, he added, that “there is no one answer to every question and we want to develop that culture in our schools so that children do not go around believing what they hear without actually asking for evidence.” In this regard, Dr. Hunte is convinced that students will have a better perspective on life; a state of affairs he thinks could impact the society as a whole.
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