Ronald Thwaites | Weak foundations

Last Thursday, I met Bobby at Newell High School in St Elizabeth. After two years in a basic school and six years at primary level, Bobby was placed in Grade 7 at Newell, 20 miles away and a $800 daily taxi fare from home.

On arrival, he was assessed and, among several others, found unable to identify the letters of the alphabet. In the normal course of events, Bobby would have struggled to attend two or three days of the week, barely ‘passed’ any subjects and ‘graduated’ into subsistence farming, idleness, fatherhood or crime by 2030.

Predictably, Bobby’s predicament, which blights all of us, is repeated a 100 times in each entering grade at Newell, and thousands of instances in a half of Jamaican high schools.

And, to complete Bobby’s portrait, he has been suspended twice, once for vaping, the other for engaging a girl in activity that not even married couples do. What the hell else do we expect when his Bible is something called TikTok, and he has never been exposed to sustained ethical or religious influences or benefited from wholesome male mentorship.

Left alone with such weak foundations, despite the millions of taxpayer dollars expended on him, the sacrifices of the grandmother who is raising him and the frustration of teachers who have really tried with him, there is strong likelihood that Bobby is fated for extinction in a “planned operation” where the Jamaican state will reek its ultimate brutality, grotesquely, in the cause of “national security and peace”. That is what is truly “abominable”!

SELF-INFLICTED

This is not the backra massa up north ordering us to self-deface and relish it like how busha and driver used to delight in impressing massa by whipping and ravaging slaves as black and oppressed as they were. That is the tale of how we have run away the Cuban doctors and nurses to our own detriment and suffering on some contrived legal pretext. No. The miseducation of a large swath of Jamaican youth is our self-inflicted wound.

COVID-19 and Hurricane Melissa have caused that wound to suppurate further. Money alone won’t salve it but, where in this Budget are the re-aligned dollars, the fixed and accountable targets; the Patterson-led policy changes, the national mobilisation to eradicate illiteracy, innumeracy and poor socialisation in schools? Fixing roofs alone is a necessary but inadequate priority . Learning loss is the biggest challenge.

MISSING VERVE

Listen to one of the new ministers last week too, oblivious of Bobby’s state, touting the prospects of higher order skills rescuing the business process outsourcing industry. Nice sounding but futile, unless the weak foundations of teaching, learning and behaviour modification are strengthened. Where else will skilled human resources be found?

And, if not in government policy, where in the current campaign for leadership of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association or the praxis of the sleepy churches who own or sponsor almost half of all schools, is the plan, the verve for education transformation?

TRANSFORMATIVE EFFORT

Eighteen months ago, at the initiative of Newell’s Board Chairman Jason Henzell and the Breds Foundation, the school joined with Grace Baston, Faith Alexander and others at St Michael’s College in the Grade 7 Academy project to employ dedicated teaching, facilitative software and gamified learning to escalate reading and maths levels among Bobby’s cohort of underachievers.

Last week, we met Bobby, saw his entering assessment showing that back then he could not recognise all the letters of the alphabet and now heard him read passages, with understanding, from an essay he had written in legible script. The subject was ‘Why people should avoid smoking’.

He has very far to go but, for Bobby and the 90 per cent of his cohort who have become more settled, see better purpose in school attendance and have advanced their literacy and numeracy grade levels, there is good prospect for them to flourish personally and to contribute heartily to national development. That’s what the Cubans have done with their people, which allows them, after state-sponsored training, to contribute to healthcare and educational upliftment all over the world. And you equate that with human trafficking?

STRONG SUPPORT

Double verification of these results is being done to verify the methodology of the Science of Reading which is the strong foundation of the Grade 7 project.

With Breds, Project STAR, National Continental, Digicel, S Hotel and many other private sector supporters, this modestly priced intervention offers hope and a strong foundation for national security, productivity and, yes, peace. Newell is working because the school’s leadership is not complacent with poor outcomes, and hold themselves accountable for student progress.

Sufficient teachers believe that the youth in their classes can succeed. They grow good food and feed the hungry ones. They need help with transportation costs and the wherewithal to hire a social worker and to run a summer school where character formation and a respect agenda are intensely promoted for parents, as well as for their children.

There is balm in Gilead.

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