Ronald Thwaites | Illiteracy SOS?

“My salary is $150,000 monthly at the Infant School. I really love the children but I can’t stay there. I have a child with special needs and rent is $70,000 for one room since the storm.

“Her school expenses and my taxi fares leave very little for food and utilities. You tell me to upgrade my HEART qualifications but how can I manage that? My choices are to look a better job in town, migrate or find a rich man to mind me”.

These were the words of one of the better teachers in a rural early childhood institution with which I am familiar. She does well because she shows love, care and firm discipline for many of the little ones who lack sufficient parental attention, who are prone to fight and curse each other, truant, distracted or who exhibit other signs of stress and unhappiness.

Although her qualifications are rudimentary, her kind heart understands that emotional balance and character training – learning and showing respect – come before and within mastering letters and numbers. Because of the way she treats their children, most of their parents offer help when she calls on them.

She makes sure that her kids come to school every day and there is always some porridge for those who turn up with tall hair, but hungry bellys. Assuming continuity of this care, her students will be ready to learn to read, compute and behave when they reach Grade 1. Their self-esteem and confidence levels will assure their success. “Illiteracy SOS” is being curbed in her classroom.

Progress at that school will diminish if and when she leaves teaching. “If I could just get enough to pay my bills, I would stay,” she pleads. But that isn’t likely.

My teacher has never heard of Orlando Patterson or his critical but mostly ignored report on how to transform Jamaican education. But what she is doing is fulfilling exactly what that report recommends. Why not support her?

AN UNEVEN SECTOR

One of the last challenges given me by Mr Seaga was to bring the dispersed and uneven early childhood sector under state sponsorship. He regretted that he had not been able to achieve this, nor has any administration since. Too much of the approximate $200 billion to be voted for education in the 2026-27 financial year is spent on remediation, propping up rigidity in the absence of a consensual philosophy of education; paying for work not properly done and repairing hurricane damage.

We are simply not being nimble enough to cope with the depth of our education crisis. Principals Ellis, Wright and others who declared “Literacy SOS” last week understand the waste of underperformance. They experience it at Grade 7.

SQUANDERING HOPE

One of my teacher’s deep yearnings is to own a little house. She groans each month when her payslip shows deduction for the National Housing Trust. Every time she sees an advertisement for a modest unit in Westmoreland, she applies. She never qualifies. She doesn’t want a cash refund. She wants a house. But now the government is in effect reducing her chances of home ownership by continuing to take more than $11 billion of potential home construction money to prop up the Budget. We are fouling our own nest.

My girl had been hoping that particularly post-Hurricane Melissa when thousands can’t regain roofs, some of that big money could be lent to contributors to catch up themselves. Her disappointed anger is multiplied among teachers, especially when they see opportunities for migration contracting.

This garnisheeing of housing money for unspecified fiscal props is a deep cut haemorrhaging hope in the country.

It was at the end of the successful Sites and Services programme in the 1970s when Michael Manley, Tony Spaulding, Fitz Ford, Kingsley Robotham, Fr Gerry McLaughlin, Clovis McLean and others conceived of the National Housing Trust as the way to keep rapid housing development going.

Siphoning billions to general revenue was a reluctant concession to get an IMF agreement at a time when there was no alternative. Government land of commensurate value was to be transferred to the NHT as consideration. That plan has degenerated into a straight money grab in subsequent years.

It is not right for this to continue this year, let alone for the next five years. It is a slap in the face of my struggling teacher lady and countless other contributors who are denied the opportunity to have a home to live decently, raise a family and, for good teachers, to stay in the classroom nurturing Jamaica’s only worthwhile future.

A five-million-dollar loan out of that same $11 billion to renovate an inner-city yard would contribute more to social stability and economic productivity than a hundred “targeted operations”.

CONSCIENCE AND CUBA

Maximum respect is due to retired prime Ministers Patterson and Golding and other CARICOM elder statesmen for their statement of solidarity with the Cuban people. What personal freedom or National sovereignty do we think Jamaicans can be guaranteed when, unprovoked, our nearest neighbours are being mangled and starved by megalomaniacs, crazed by grudges and the hubris of self-anointed exceptionalism?

Do our current leaders, civic and religious, abide by the principles of international law only when convenient or when there is no likely consequence to visas? The snarls of Empire never scared our national heroes. What about now? If we are craven, “ history will not absolve us”.

And if we continued to remain dumb and therefore complicit about advantage-taking next+door, what civic values will that teacher impart and model to her young pupils?

Averting Illiteracy SOS involves elevating the morals of courage and consistent friendship not the wiliness of cowardice and opportunism!

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