Martin Henry
MINISTER OF Education, Maxine Henry-Wilson wants to double sixth form space. And Dr. Peter Phillips in his role as campaigner for the presidency of the PNP and to be the next prime minister of Jamaica wants to see an expansion of boarding school space.
There are only 5,000 sixth formers and the minister wants to create 5,000 more spaces. The presidential/prime ministerial candidate wants boarding schools to help in solving some of the social problems of the country.
Both the sixth form and the boarding school have a distinguished place in the educational past and serve useful purposes.
The Gleaner story on Sunday reporting Dr. Phillips' proposal to expand boarding facilities noted that "There is support for the argument that boarding schools provide an enhanced learning environment." Dr. Dennis Minott, who recently lashed community colleges severely over their 'poor' performance while extolling the virtues of the sixth form, was cited as presenting "compelling evidence in favour of expanding boarding school places." Minott's A-QUEST in its last study of school performance in the CSEC and CAPE exams found that the boarding schools were among the best performers.
But the fact is, the traditional sixth form attached to the traditional high school as much for prestige and school spirit as for university prep learning is in relative decline. There are only 5,000 sixth formers in a total all-secondary school population of some 200,000 students, adding up all categories. And most of them are studying vocational business subjects anyway, on the slow track to a management career.
There was a time, a painful time, in Jamaica's educational history when the handful of 'high schools' were virtually all boarding schools. And every single one of the five surviving boarding schools have come from that era.
POLITICAL PROPONENTS
These political proponents would not have missed the revolution in the expansion of educational access over the last generation in Jamaica and in the more developed world for somewhat longer. Nor would they have missed the political dimension of education and its economic costs.
There is also a kind of 'quality' cost to the mass expansion of education. Everywhere in the world, including Britain from where we have modelled much of our education system and ideas, there have been some declines in traditional performance measures as the movement is made from elite and exclusionary systems to mass inclusionary systems. And there has been a massive sea change in the meaning and purpose of 'higher education'.
Both the sixth form and the boarding school, with their considerable virtues, are expensive and uneconomical in the age of mass education.
Dr. Phillips sees the boarding school as "a great social leveller." Once you get in. Look at the iniquitous scramble for good (traditional) high school places from GSAT placements now.
Dr. Minott is recommending the introduction of boarding in schools across the island, with boarders to make up 20 per cent of the school population. So immediately 80 per cent of the school population will be excluded. Who is to be in? Who is to be out?
DISCRIMINATORY ADVANTAGE
These are not only educational and sociological questions; they are major political questions. Current boarders [and future ones will] enjoy enormous discriminatory advantage at state expense for the cost of boarding. And if the massive state support is removed, boarding goes back to the wealthy.
The proposers could not have missed the fact that, in the midst of an explosion of university and college places in just the past few years, the UWI is the only tertiary institution in the country specifically requiring a sixth form feed. Everybody else offering first degrees is a four-year institution with a CSEC feed. Education policy cannot be so institution-specific.
But the youngsters in secondary schools have picked up long time now that an additional two years in sixth form is no longer the standard highway to tertiary education, and there won't be anybody to fill the additional 5,000 sixth form places should the minister press ahead in creating them.
And the modern university is no longer just the home of academic pursuit and scholarship for the pure love of learning and requiring an 'Advanced Level' base for matriculation. The university has adopted the old functions of apprenticeship for skills and vocational and professional training. Just by numbers this is now its dominant function; and there is no turning back. Indeed, as many thinkers like Peter Drucker writing about the liberal arts in management in particular, have prognosticated, the very survival of purist academic pursuits may depend on hitching them to 'practical' education. Something which the country's University of Technology is very actively working with.
Sixth form expansion and the grand return of the boarding school aren't going to happen. The ground has shifted, and the ministers and aspiring politicians very well know that the economic and political costs cannot be met and are not worth the return to the romantic past. Spend the time and effort and money in getting all secondary schools to deliver better CSEC results.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
