Ronald Thwaites | Focus on character development

The 16 year-old Grade 10 student leaned over the principal’s desk where he had been brought for correction because of chronic absenteeism, bullying, fighting and failing grades, his trousers hitched at his thighs. “Who you live with? Where are your parents”? He was asked. “Mi live wid mi auntie. Dem seh mi fadda kill mi madda an’ den shoot imself”.

The other youth with whom I contended last week is around the same age. Same wounded symptoms as the first guy. This one is musically talented. At home, he watches his father disrespect and sometimes beat his mother. When she tries to correct the son, he dishes out his father’s ’s behaviour to her. That’s the only language he knows. He brings it to school – if and when he attends.

These are real cases. There are tens of thousands more like them, to a greater or lesser degree, across the nation. Perhaps 20 per cent of many school populations. When the school calls a meeting, less than 10 per cent of parents come. Suspensions are doled out like confetti. Teachers cannot handle the extent of distraction and disruptiveness. Levels of staff absenteeism (most but not all sanctioned by a hopelessly outdated Code of Regulations) are sometimes as bad as the students. The hopeless exam results show the inevitable outcomes.

WHAT FOLLOWS

Outright failure and underperformance become the norm. So, not surprisingly the principal of the UWI Mona campus says only a fraction of our workforce is sufficiently trained to be internationally competitive. Here come the Chinese, Cubans, Nigerians, Filipinos – anyone better educated, who will come to fill our self-created gap. Lowering the murder rate does not assuage the terror of crime or produce a climate of peace, because we all know that the antecedents, rather than the incidents, of violence have not been stanched.

WHAT’S MISSING

There are grossly inadequate facilities to remediate the circumstances of the two youths described above. There are no social workers to relate to parents and communities. The ratio of one dege-dege guidance counsellor to 800 students can’t suffice. Therapy is expensive and hard to find. In most places, private security guards at school gates do not carry the respect or the training of police school resource officers.

NO ORDER

Look here: there can be no effective education unless there is order. Church members who could be wholesome presences in every schoolyard are very busy singing “Praise the Lord” rather than casting out devils like Jesus did. Governments, especially at election time, confuse us to think that making pronouncements and promises equates with reforming the base.

It is noteworthy that the Educate Jamaica High School Performance Index 2024, which ranks 28 institutions which deliver matriculable outcomes (five CSEC passes including English and mathematics) comprise 27 church- and trust-owned schools, and one completely state-controlled school. What does this tell us?

ACKNOWLEDGING CAUSATION

Listening to the strong speeches by Minister Dixon and the prime minister at the awards function for educational excellence last Wednesday, and sitting near to Commissioner Blake and knowing the strain all of the awardees have undergone in their classrooms, I wonder if those officials, indeed all of us, understand the linear connection between bad socialisation, poor educational uptake, inter-generational pop-down, crime, violence and low productivity.

And, if we do understand this, where is this reflected in budget priorities, a framework of accountability, available services and national mobilisation?

WHAT’S NEEDED

After a year of detailed observation of a so far promising uplift programme for literacy and numeracy in underperforming high schools, I am convinced that explicit sustained efforts at character formation are important, as is therapy for reading and writing.

Consider the two cases referenced above. Those boys are simply too unsettled to learn or behave effectively. We have been presuming that more reading and arithmetic would improve their self-confidence and overcome some of their social and emotional deficits. But the human personality does not quite work in that sequence.

Strong but compassionate discipline and routine, culturing attitudes of respect and self-restraint, require as many hours of precepting and modelling as literacy and numeracy. Our curriculum and teacher deployment do not cater for this dire emergency. Most teachers have not been taught to successfully navigate the troubled waters in which their pupils are drowning. Others do not have the hearts of compassion to cope.

VALUES AND ATTITUDES AGAIN

At his awards function the prime minister correctly noted that work-readiness of the labour force requires not just the surfeit of knowledge which is at everyone’s fingertips nowadays but serviceable attitudes. P.J. Patterson’s scorned crusade has become an even more acute prerequisite for any hope of a peaceful, gentle and lawful society.

The deficit of moral education is not adequately dealt with in the Patterson Report. There’s an incomplete assumption that moral principles are pre-existing from home and church (how many attend anyway?) or otherwise infused in the normal school experience. This is manifestly not so. Check the two examples above. Until this huge gap is confronted and corrected, there will be no sufficient transformation of the education experience in Jamaica.

A NEW STRATEGY

Discernment, wisdom’s child, requires something more than what we are delivering now. I get the sense that our political leaders, and particularly Mr Holness, understand this but have no idea as to how it can be accomplished. He and Minister Morris Dixon should require no more than five seasoned educators and behaviourists to formulate a character formation programme to start this September.

If the JTA and the churches are true to their purposes, they ought to be partners in this exercise. Necessary elements must include mandatory engagement with parents, socio-emotional testing, strict campus discipline for students and teachers, heavy civics, values and attitudes instruction, and engagement in service-oriented co-curricular activities. It is useless to mouth platitudes about education being the most powerful tool of human and national development but leave my two troubled youth, and the legion of others like them, on an escalator to failure.

And, please, when those in charge try to promote their party politics while talking about reforming education, it really becomes insipid and trumpish. It forfeits credibility and robs the effort of national buy-in.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com