Martin Henry I HAVE had the most interesting interaction with the High School Equivalency Programme (HISEP) people over the last few days. The pilot phase of the programme is now up and running. Students are being prepared in one-day workshops for starting and successfully completing the programme and I had the privilege of addressing groups of them on Communication Skills, thanks to Elaine Ferguson, the Programme Manager, and her team. These adult learners have been doing other start-up stuff as well in Independent Learning, Time Management, Group Dynamics, and the Psychology of Learning.
Here are people eager and anxious to succeed. The majority of the population have not completed high school, or have left school without external examination passes. HISEP offers an opportunity to gain lost ground and step up in life. There is a remarkable range of ambitious Jamaicans in those pilot groups and I was particularly pleased to see the balance of men and women and the age balance, from fairly young to middle-aged that the Programme Secretariat engineered. For many, especially older people, this was a sheer lack of opportunity to get in, much more to get out qualified.
It is remarkable the strides that many such persons have made with what they had. But there is always that academic barrier blocking further progress. Access to tertiary education is denied. Promotion in formal jobs is restricted. That diploma is going to open doors as the U.S. General Education Diploma has been doing for that population for several decades. The thing is, beneficiaries already know how to seize, or make, opportunities and they have no time to waste.
My long-standing interest in adult education and high school equivalency is both professional and personal. Today a bit of the personal. I am the only one of my many siblings who got the chance of a high school education at the normal age for it, having being smart enough to be born last. A couple of others completed equivalency programmes abroad and went into tertiary education very successfully up to postgraduate level. But nothing in Jamaica.
FRUSTRATIONS IN JAMAICA
So I had a view of the frustrations of the diploma ceiling up front and close. A few years ago I recommended the U.S. equivalent high school diploma by correspondence course to an older sister; and a dog of my age, much more hers, is no pup. At the same time I was busy lobbying tertiary institutions here to accept that diploma as satisfying entry requirements. I got some cool sort of non-committal, yes, we will consider it responses. But nobody was really pounding on their doors, equivalency diploma in hand.
With a national HISEP now running, at last, we hope, there will be no effort made to hold up alternative qualifications for entry to tertiary education. From what I can see, the developers, the HEART Trust/NCTVET system AND JAMAL, have developed a rigorous general education programme around five integrated domains, which is certainly a superior holistic approach to accumulating separate CXC subjects. We need a regular, standardised high school diploma as certification of the satisfactory completion of secondary general education.
CORRESPONDENCE
So sister, in mid-life, took up the challenge of getting high school qualification by correspondence while busy as ever with a clerical job with no real prospect of seniority, with family and with church. I was kept busy with tutorial assistance in Maths and Science and other things I had long forgotten on the surface.
Armed with that foreign High School Diploma and a bundle of other sub-degree certificates accumulated over years of attending courses, she knocked on the door of a small, private, church-run degree-granting institution. I am still not sure if state institutions would have accepted. She is now, after her own daughter has already earned a first degree and her son-in-law a second, Aneita B. Hamilton, B.A. The course was completed after losing a 25-year-old job to redundancy.
Sister's A grade thesis was a refreshingly creative, thoughtful and useful piece of work. I have read quite a few undergraduate and postgraduate theses and supervised a number, most of them quite mundane, written and over-supervised "in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree in."
This one, 'A Study of the Problem of Loneliness in the Elderly', is a good, fairly original read with strong 'clinical' implications. The study set out "to investigate the causes contributing to loneliness and its effects on the elderly; provide basic information about the life, living and care of the elderly as it relates to the home, community, and church; [and] to help the family and friends of the elderly to be able to recognise and define the resources that can address the needs of their elderly within the home, community and church and how to mobilise those resources to meet the needs."
This door of opportunity for further education is now being opened for thousands of Jamaican adults through the HISEP.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
