The problem we face in our school system is not just discrimination

May 29, 2018 Sports

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DEAR EDITOR,
The problem we face in our school system is not just discrimination, nor even primarily discrimination, although that certainly does exist.
We also have problems with parents who cannot help their children because they too had an inadequate education, or because they are unwilling to spend time working and playing with their children, and problems with teachers who do not recognize the difficulties such children have to overcome, or who do not themselves understand the language, mathematics, science or technology they are called upon to teach.
I did well at school and university. But then I had parents who worked and played with me, read books to me, then bought a variety of books for me to read, followed my progression in school carefully, and encouraged me in myriad ways.
I was also fortunate to have really good teachers at the two primary schools I attended, Freeburg and St Sidwell’s and my secondary school, The Bishops’ High School. My children in turn both went on to Universities and both did well. But then they too had everything going for them.
There are numerous studies right here in Guyana and the Caribbean which show that children with such backgrounds do better in the various competitive examinations than their less fortunate compatriots. So a major problem is how we overcome this disadvantage faced by so many of our children who may be just as intelligent as I and my children were.
And here we come to our problem with the teaching in our schools.
Too many of our teachers are themselves deficient in (a) the basic information they need to pass on to students, and (b) the skills to find ways of communicating information to students of differing abilities.
To give you examples of what I mean: (a) basic information – we teach children how to use indefinite articles “a” and “an” by telling them that it is “a” before a word that begins with consonant and “an” before a word beginning with a vowel. True for most vowels. But the rule is actually “a” before a consonant SOUND and “an” before a vowel SOUND. The vowels a,e,i and o all have vowel sounds whether they are pronounced as “ah” or “aa”, “eh” or “ee” and so on. But “u” – that can be “uh” as in “umbrella” or “uncertain” or “yoo” as in “union” or “uniform”. “Yoo” is a consonant sound so we do not say “an uniform” or “an Union”. But I know of a teacher who “corrected” a young student who wrote “a uniform”. Then there was a teacher (this was one of my son’s teachers) who was teaching about electricity, who clearly did not understand what a closed circuit was, since he was describing that system as one in which the flow of electricity is interrupted. For him, “closed” meant that no electricity could pass through the system! And that same teacher did not know that a rat is a mammal. Or, for that matter, a whale as well. A whale is a fish, he said. And I found a Caribbean produced text book for young children, which, in teaching the use of the verb “to have”, stated that we use “has” for one person and “have” for more than one person. Well, no. Because it is “I have” and “you (whether one of you or a multitude) have”.
(b) the skills to find ways of communicating information to students of differing abilities is an even more tricky problem. Too many of our teachers have one way of explaining something, and if some students do not “get it” then the assumption is that it is the students are at fault – either because they were not paying attention, or because they are stupid, or because they are troublesome students. But we don’t all learn the same way. Some of us (a) can learn by rote and apply what we have learned without fully understanding it; (b) some of us need to understand before we can apply; and (c) some of us need to have our interest in the subject stimulated before we are even willing to learn.
I fell into category (a) and so I was labeled “bright”. I skipped what was then called “Big ABC”, now K2, and went straight to First Standard, with a few extra lessons to learn things like long division. But I did not fully and clearly understand our numeration system which uses nine symbols and a zero to write all numbers, until I needed to get a class of eight year olds in the UK to understand that the written symbols that signify eighteen objects are “18” and not “81”.
That was when I consciously understood what I had long ago learned, and could work with, without consciously understanding, which is that we write words from left to right, (those poor kids were saying “eight-teen” and writing 8-1. After all, the word starts with eight, doesn’t it?); but we write numbers from 1 to 9 then shift to the left, not the right, and start with 1 again and a zero, then 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, and so on until we reach 99, when we shift to the left again and write 100.
My son was category (c). I got him to learn to read via his interest in airplanes – I bought him models of increasing complexity to construct, until he reached one that required him to read instructions rather than simply look at pictures in order to put it together. And I refused to read it for him. He learned to read. And his grades at university were the barest minimum he needed to continue his course, until he started Political Science, which he enjoyed.
In his final year he achieved all A grades. He now has a PhD and is an Associate Professor. How many students do we now have who are not category (a) students, but (b) or (c), and who do not have a teacher who recognizes the need to adapt her/his teaching methods to the needs of the student? If those (b) and (c) students do not have some other adult in the background who can assist, then the students are too often labeled failures, however intelligent they may be.
Then there is the written word. Standard English, the language which our students are expected to be able to write, is a complicated language. It has a base which derives from Germanic languages spoken by the Anglo-Saxons who displaced the original Britons. To that was added old French, spoken by the Normans who conquered the Anglo-Saxons. Then there were words added from Latin and Greek, the languages of the Christian religious writings, and therefore languages learned by all persons educated at the universities (which were initially schools for clerical trainees).
Then there are numerous words adopted from other peoples, as the British became sailors, explorers and then conquerors who established a worldwide empire. Words like shampoo, pajamas, bungalow, verandah, cashmere, calico, thug, all of which came from the Indian sub-continent; tomato, avocado which came from the Americas; and nadir, alcohol, algebra from Arabic; and boomerang from Australian Aborigines.
Then in some cases there has been a shift in either pronunciation or meaning of a word over the centuries (so that “suffer”, for example, today has a different meaning from the meaning in the sentence “Suffer the children to come unto me” in the early seventeenth century translation of the Bible known as the King James Version).
English now uses just 26 letters as symbols for more than 40 sounds; so the same letters can represent more than one sound. “Ch”, for example, can be “chuh” as in “church”, or “k” as in “chaos” or “character”. I once heard a former teacher say that a “cha-sam” is a deep hole. When I told her that the word is pronounced “ka-sm” she asked me to spell the word. I spelled c-h-a-s-m. She asked how could that be “ka”. I told her, in the same way that Christ is not pronounced Chuh-ryst.
So you see, it is not just a problem of discrimination. Until we can bring all schools and their teachers (not to mention the officials in the Ministry of Education and the authors of text books) to the point where they really teach effectively, we will continue to have some intelligent children who fail to perform as they should.
And given that entry to secondary schools is based on an assessment of the students’ primary school attainment, then some secondary schools will continue to receive the students identified as “the brightest”. Even if we turned all our secondary school into area schools, drawing their students from a specified catchment area, that would still not solve the problem.
Wealthier parents and parents who are able to assist their children would buy houses in the catchment area of outstanding/desirable secondary schools (as they do even now in the UK and the USA).
And if we could eliminate selection from secondary schools, then Universities and Technical, Medical, Arts, Drama, Music Schools and Colleges and just about every institute of higher education will still be selective, as by definition they cannot take in everybody, so all look for the best students in whatever area of study is their specialty. We are all selective. I do not buy foods that are substandard, I do not read badly written books, I try to avoid to an incompetent individual in whatever sphere – I would certainly not employ such an individual to build my house. Life is competitive and selective.
So everything comes back to that basic education and upbringing that our children receive. And right now too many are not getting the education they deserve and need.
Pat Robinson Commissiong

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