Ronald Thwaites | Adding value

Located out in the hills of south St Elizabeth, I experienced the true spirit of Jamaica thriving and beautiful last week. An industrious and enterprising teacher, appreciating the unmet need for special education and conscious of the opportunities for children beyond the capacity of publicly supported schools and knowing how ineffective extra lessons often turn out, she started a storefront school.

Offering a “great start”, advertising by word-of-mouth testimony about the school’s tone and performance, the student body has grown from 30 to more than 400 in a few short years.

INSTITUTION BUILDING

Institutions are the weight-bearing columns of culture. This country’s history of progress has been wrought by individuals like the Guyanese Mr. Hazelwood whose St Simon’s College, a century ago, educated Hugh Shearer, Samuel Carter, Louise Bennett, Joyce Robinson and G Arthur Brown among others. Remember Mr. Wesley Powell, Bishop Gibson and patriots like them, including the Christian Churches, who started with little or no physical and material resources but endless spiritual energy to build a kingdom of enabled youths who the official system excluded or less-cared.

That is the excellence and sacredness of the Jamaican spirit. Not bashment, ‘flashyness’, conspicuous consumption, relational looseness, inequality and oppression of one’s own kith and kin.

ACCOUNTABILITY

The teachers at that country school know they will not be employed if they do not give of their best and show results. Providing individual-sensitive education, leaning heavily on parents to be supportive, the outcomes are very encouraging. The Grade 6 students whose graduation I attended, have all been placed in satisfactory high schools which means that they can read, compute and behave at an acceptable level. So they are exceptional. I wager that they will do well in their studies and personal development. It is unlikely that they will turn to crime. Hopefully, most of them will seek and create stable personal relationships.

A CONTRAST

This is in contrast to a limited survey of school-leavers in one of the underperforming schools I monitor, which is showing a frightening number, who within seven years have been killed, arrested for some crime, are unemployed, regressed into deep illiteracy and have fathered a child outside of a committed relationship.

STRAIGHT THINKING

The best investment any parent and the State can make in a child is to prioritise their education. Instead of spending billions on false hair, nails, bleaching crème, tattoos, eyelashes, excessive fast food and drink, mash down the lie that any government (and certainly not this one!) can provide enough for every child’s sound education. The leaders know they are deceiving you but are too arrogant to acknowledge their fault. Spend your money on what is in your child’s head and heart not what is external and temporary.

At my country school children are exposed to sound Christian-based values. Mutual respect, modest deportment, responsibility and punctuality are enjoined. When parents sense that there is good prospect for their children at a particular school they cooperate more and are prepared to pay what they can.

At another school I am watching, parents receive periodic phone calls from the instructional leader herself to engage them in their child’s upbringing. Where the family connection is weak, voluntary social workers from a connected church are deployed to fill some gaps.

PRIVATE SCHOOLS

There are probably more than 500 private educational institutions in Jamaica. They vary in quality, size and sustainability. They are not awkward relics inferior to the publicly funded system. They play vital supplementary roles and should be cultured and supported.

At least a half of all the crucial early childhood institutions are not state owned or controlled. Late in his retirement, Mr. Seaga expressed to me his unfulfilled desire to see these formative institutions better endowed by public funds. Serious curriculum change and upskilling of teachers in the early childhood sector remain urgent and unfulfilled priorities.

STANDARD SETTING

Variants of these caring practices should become normative. The Transport Authority ought to strictly monitor the dress and general behaviour of the horde of taxi drivers who groom the majority of youngsters. We have to find $500 a day for food for the majority of students who desperately need a wholesome summer school programme. $200 for PATH students cannot be the limit of this society’s contribution to effective learning, the antidote to stunted growth and crime and violence.

ACCEPTING RESPONSIBILITY

A society where no one accepts responsibility for mistakes, omissions and failure cannot advance inclusively, if at all. In the education sector, teachers do not hold themselves accountable. Parents blame teachers and governments deny reality or absolve themselves.

The human condition is fallible. We all fall short. If you hold power in any situation, acknowledging error, failure or misdeeds is an ingredient of honour, not disgrace. It opens the possibility for correction. I accept the mistakes and shortsightedness during my season of responsibility for education management and policy.

So did Dr. Fenton Ferguson when some very sick babies died at the Victoria Jubilee Hospital during his tenure as minister. Remember the contrived (and some genuine) angst expressed by Drs Tufton and Holness who, inspired by the crying spirits of the dead babies, bayed for Fenton’s political head. They said he, and Portia, had to take personal responsibility.

So what this time? Many more dead babies, every implausible-sounding excuse trotted out: no acceptance of accountability and, this time, no significant outcry from a public who, in sullen resignation, expects no different from those who demand the trappings of power, the plenty money and ‘skin-teet’ but who will not take the fall when matters for which they are politically or technically responsible fail so tragically. No. They even start to shift blame to grieving mothers. Caught red-handed, they bleat like Shaggy, It wasn’t me.

PATHETIC

It was the same last week with the pathetic disclaimer by NEPA of their role in the probably irreversible pollution of the Rio Cobre. Damage done. Innocent people suffering. No correction. Recurrence inevitable.

So on the lip of an election, we have continuing failure in education and more fatal shortcomings in the health sector. Environmental degradation is escalating. Those in charge “tek bush” clutching their fat salaries, dissembling statements, writs of election and letters of permanent appointment.

Who is adding value? What can go so?

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