Delroy Chuck THE JAMAICAN society desperately searches for a solution to crime. The solution will certainly not come in one package. Crime and its tentacles spread far and wide, throughout every level of society, and demand a remedial response from every sector of the society. The intellectually bankrupt, bereft of useful and workable ideas, frightened by the prospect of an even further deterioration of the social order, propose a state of emergency to stem the tide of murders, extortion and rampage. To what end? If a state of emergency does not work, then what?
The real challenge to the Jamaican society is to think its way out of the crime-ridden mess. Our education system has certainly failed us. It has not generated a nation of thinkers but of believers who grab at every premise and feeling, faithfully believing they will work, without working through whether that premise or feeling can really solve the problem. Solutions are definitely needed but, first, we need to better understand the problems, instead of offering half-baked solutions that can only aggravate and worsen the social cancer gnawing away at every corner of the Jamaican society. Crime is a multi-faceted affair, there is simply no one solution that will solve the whole problem.
CONTRIBUTING TO OUR PROBLEMS
Amazingly, I think our education system is contributing to our problems instead of working towards a better society. I understand and appreciate the cliché that education can make a difference but, in Jamaica, the whole Jamaican society is failing our young people and education is not making a difference. How can our education system help our young people when 90% of them leave our educational institutions without certificates, skills and qualifications that can open doors and create opportunities in the wider society? In truth, the schools are turning out hordes of illiterates, uncertified and hopeless young people, with very little prospect of immediate attachment and significant achievement in the real world.
Education opens the mind, promises a better tomorrow, provides the vehicle for individual progress and equips our young people to find their way to a brighter future. At one level, many of our young people are getting the benefit of education, gaining the needed passes and certification, entering tertiary institutions and, probably, end up migrating and finding opportunities abroad. At other levels, there are huddled masses of young people who are simply frustrated by the whole education process, and end up being dropouts and a burden on the society. It is at this latter level that we find the ready candidates for social deviance and criminal activity. They are the ones to which we must turn our attention.
STERLING CONTRIBUTION BY SEAGA
The Leader of the Opposition, Edward Seaga, has made a sterling contribution to the education debate by showing how the system is failing our young people. In his many addresses on the topic, including his recent contributions in Parliament, he has identified the problem as starting from the basic school level, at which stage the children from the inner cities and rural areas, in general, fail to get the mental stimulation that would prepare them to take advantage of primary school. When they enter primary schools, many are left behind, as they simply cannot cope and the brighter ones get the attention, focus and support from the teachers and others. When the GSAT or, hitherto, Common Entrance examinations come around, they fail and enter the non-traditional secondary schools, where they simply mark time until they leave at age 15 or 16.
It would be interesting for the Ministry of Education to publish some of the results of the GSAT examinations. It is shocking to know that many students cannot even score 20 per cent and, yet, they have to be placed in secondary schools what will they ever achieve, without serious remedial training? Then, Dr. Ralph Thompson in The Gleaner, October 2, discussed the passes at the CXC level and demonstrated that our children are failing, and are being short-changed and left behind. In the globalised world, with that level of failures, how can we ever compete? Yet, these are the children who graduate from our educational institutions, into the communities, into a harsh world where they have to compete with certified graduates. At age 15 or 16, without experience and qualifications, without reading skills and thinking power, what sort of work can they be expected to undertake?
On reflection, I wonder what sort of life I would have lived if I had to leave school at age 16? Yet, that is what is being done to most of our young people. At this tender age, our young people are simply not fully socialised, equipped and ready for the challenges of the real world. They end up on street corners and into anti-social behaviour the young females bearing children and the young men joining gangs where they find comfort, and others who share their hopelessness and frustrations. They are the ready soldiers patrolling the streets, wandering, demanding, and expecting the society to rescue them. In their struggle for status, respect and survival, crime becomes a real alternative, perhaps the only sure alternative.
In the challenge to find solutions, we need to also find causes and, I daresay, the failure of our education system to benefit the vast majority of our young people sets the stage for the crisis and mess overwhelming the society. An overhaul of the whole education system may well be the beginning for a new social order, in which crime and other social deviance can be controlled, as we better equip and prepare more of our young people for a better start at the workplace, in their community and in life.
Delroy Chuck is an attorney-at-law and Opposition Member of Parliament. He can be contacted by at delchuck@hotmail.com
