Daniel Thwaites | What is to be done (in education)?

A spectre is haunting the education system – the spectre of magical thinking and an unimaginative response to a crisis. Education Commissar Karl Samuda is making some terrible mistakes, but it’s not too late to reverse course and get back on track. Let’s hope he can find the smarts and courage to switch things around.

Actually, it’s not even clear that he’s the one to whom these petitions ought to be addressed. Because the country has been limping along without an education minister ever since Commissar Ruel Yezhov Reid was airbrushed out of the official history of prosperity. Who knows why Samuda can’t be given the big-boy forward, but Holness still has him in short pants and using training wheels.

Comrade Samuda – if I’m addressing the right guy – is not approaching the matter of assisting private schools at all correctly. As is well known, he made a sojourn through the more socialistic PNP, and I’m wondering and worried that he may have picked up a little too much over there. He has said, on more than one occasion, that the private schools are businesses and, therefore, shouldn’t look to Government for help.

Whoa there, Comrade Karl ‘Marx’ Samuda! Not so quick! I think you just failed the ‘Real-World Based Assessment’ portion of the PEP exam to graduate into a full ministerial role. Let’s break it down.

There are over 70,000 students in early childhood institutions spread across something like 2,500 basic and infant schools. About two-thirds of those are ‘private’, if you want to be quarrelsome and class many little institutions run by churches and charities in that way.

But that’s using the term ‘private’ to mean ‘non-government’, and not ‘private’ to mean ‘for profit’. Because they’re a lot easier to ignore if you have the masses thinking they’re ‘for profit’ and so should find their own way in this world like KFC and Mother’s (although one secretly prays for these cherished institutions also).

Antsy

However, the proletariat might get a lot more antsy if they recognised that what our half-minister is referring to here are many institutions developed by public-spirited citizens to fill a gap the State doesn’t even think it can fill.

In other words, these are people picking up the slack of an inadequate government system that doesn’t even pretend to have enough spaces and resources to educate the children. In even more other words, it’s Government that is parasitic on the goodwill of civilians in this scenario, not the other way around.

So it’s not a good look when Comrade Karl waves off these struggling institutions. Wheel and come again!

Beg Nigel a money for them, or arrange for some soft loans. Something. Don’t abandon them. Moreover, since many are administered and ordinarily paid for by churches, many prayers will go up on your behalf.

In case the prayer doesn’t move Minister Samuda, he needs to consider what would happen if these institutions are to buckle and disgorge their students. Nothing good would come of it. The Government cannot afford to build or maintain basic schools for these children as it is.

Tens of thousands of children will have nowhere to go and the modest gains in early childhood education, bought with much sweat and determination in a system that NEVER forgets that these little ones cannot vote, will be decisively reversed.

Worse, consider what could happen if the some 600 other private schools, some of which are high schools, but most of which are preparatory, were to give up the ghost. There will be thousands of children descending upon a public system that has no space for them. We might really have a revolution!

The next big error is this plan to limp ahead with the school term on the assumption that due to an announcement that instruction and learning is to be happening, it means that instruction and learning is happening.

No doubt there are very many administrators, teachers, parents and students who are making valiant efforts to keep the school term going and to teach the curriculum. But the best evidence tells us that there are hundreds of thousands of students getting left behind. When the Jamaica Teachers’ Association’s (JTA) chief, Owen Speid, says it’s 200,000 students without access, we can safely assume it’s at least twice that.

Anyway, our teachers are not prepared and trained to give instruction that way. Internet-enabled pedagogy isn’t about just turning on a webcam and piping the lesson over broadband. It’s a speciality skill conducive to certain teaching styles and not others. Furthermore, the pedagogical uptake of the students can be enhanced with many tools and techniques that your regular classroom teacher simply doesn’t know and wouldn’t be expected to have. It’s not their fault, but they’re not prepared for this.

Another long list of problems with barrelling along with the school year stem directly from just poverty, at least among the Jamaicans who have children.

Don’t forget for a moment that of the roughly 650,000 youngsters in educational institutions across the island, some 300,000 are receiving PATH benefits. Get that? Almost half of our students hail from families relying on welfare. In what world of magical thinking do those families have the infrastructure to handle online-enabled learning? And that, without there being a focused programme to assist that entablement before kicking off the nationwide experiment?

Plan will not work

Niet, Comrade Karl! That plan will not work.

Here’s what needs to happen. In an ideal world where the education system wasn’t as arthritic, sclerotic, and lethargic, the schools would have been shut down and the summer break brought on early. May and June would be an early summer break.

The time ought to be used to prepare schools, communities, and families for more remote instruction.

Here’s my speculation. Samuda and Holness, or whoever the ultimately responsible minister happens to be, can’t even think about approaching the JTA with any argument about shutting down now and using the traditional summertime (July and August) as the last term of the 2019-2020 school year. And that’s not because of the disrupted calendar, because everyone’s calendar worldwide has been disrupted with this pandemic.

The real reason is that they would have to get to the bargaining table with the JTA, and election time is coming, and that just simply ain’t happening! An election year is not an obvious time to upset a relatively well-organised voting bloc, however much common sense dictates that they need to be asked to adjust to the changed circumstances brought upon us all by the pandemic.

Although the hackneyed phrase that education is an investment in the future annoys me, that’s only because all hackneyed phrases annoy me, not because it isn’t true. What’s more, the education sector is an enormous part of the present-day economy.

Comrade Karl needs to leave the uninspired responses to this unprecedented crisis in the dustbin of history and rise to the challenge. Leave aside the doctrinaire approach to what’s ‘public’ and what’s ‘private’, and drop the magical thinking about instruction going on right now. Big, bold moves, I know. But that’s what we need, and what is to be done, right now.

- Daniel Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.