The Gleaner, last Tuesday, as part of its year-long focus on education, hosted a Gleaner Editors' Forum looking at home schooling and the role of technology. Today, we present excerpts from the discussion.
"THAT'S THE question I always heard asked. That's the famous word educators use, and you know what socialisation means, I discovered? We tested the school system on three occasions. Socialisation means allowing your child to be among children who are talking about sex and the sex experience they have. Socialisation means allowing your child to be among children who are fighting. My child is socialised by meeting with everybody of all ages, not just stuffed in a classroom with three-year-olds who cannot read or write either, who cannot speak English either, who have no experience to share.
"Socialisation must mean socialising within the whole society.
I have the most brilliant little girl from Cockburn Gardens, Olympic Gardens. She is in a class of 52, and here is how I met her. We went to open a computer centre and this little girl met us and started sending me e-mail at the age of eight. E-mail in intelligent English, drawing cards. I have taken her out and I take her and give her classes on Saturdays. She is in a class of 52. What can be done for this brilliant little girl unless someone like me comes along and drags her out of this situation?
THINK OF CHANGE
"I can answer. Consider, for example, schools, I mean you can never give everyone in that 52 class a computer, it's impossible to give every student in Jamaica a computer. Think though about schools that are built around a community centre serving only students of that particular community. Classrooms would not be for groups of students but for each subject, music, arts and crafts, history and geography, languages, sciences including maths, spaces for innovation and creative expression, leisure and games. And what I am talking is not a dream. UNESCO at the moment supports the development of these community multimedia centres. Let's change the way we deliver education and then every child will have access to a computer without you putting one in every child's hand, that's impossible. The Computers in Education Programme is wonderful. What the Ministry of Education has done is to put computers in school it's excellent, admirable, but you see, it will never get us where we need to be. Let's think of change.
"I am just saying let's think of a new way of deploying them that will really be effective. Let me tell you, with Microsoft alone you can go on the Internet and get classes in anything, and the teacher is there embedded into the programme. My little girl comes over and the first thing she says, give me a quiz. So I just click, there is a English quiz 20 words and the computer marks it and tells her where she went wrong. I don't need a diploma in education. I say there you are honey, click click and I go and finish cooking."
- Blake-Hannah
