Ronald Thwaites | Enriching young minds

So pervasive is the examination culture in most of our schools that too little attention is paid to stretching the minds of our young people, especially by extracurricular involvement. Sports of course is the exception. But exposure to the arts, rhetoric, business culture and religious and ethical considerations are often perfunctory or non-existent. Most often there is no money for enrichment. Wholesome values and attitudes are poorly modelled.

So bright kids are likely to graduate with plenty CXCs but do not know how to function in genteel and productive situations nor have a sensitive social conscience. The results are life-cramping. This is so especially for boys, many of whom leave school without serviceable personal or occupational skills.

Who will our talented (and ‘demure’) women marry, I sometimes wonder. For if they are unequally yoked or forswear marriage, we already know what the upbringing of their children will be like.

GOOD INITIATIVE

My alma mater, St George’s College is taking steps to correct this deficiency. Concerned alumni are initiating a monthly public lecture series which will expose students to graduates who have excelled in a variety of endeavours. The first of these will take place on March 25 at 2 pm on the North Street campus when agri-businessman Jason Sharp will describe his journey from primary producer to final product retailer and exporter. Given the extraordinarily broad contributions of Georgians locally and internationally, these interactions will expand the imaginations, moral outlook and aspirations of the young people who engage.

Other schools ought to use similar talent at their disposal, or which can be shared in a Quality Education Circle, to enthuse students to aspire beyond the banality of the locker room, the crotch-grabbing ethos of the dance hall or the scam mentality of entitlement. As we are finding out, the gaps in the National Standards Curriculum point to the need for urgent review and supplementation. Sufficient opportunities for character enrichment are missing.

GIFT

What a gift it was to listen to the late Phyllis Mitchell’s brother describe his generation’s upbringing at her funeral service recently. He told of their father, a man with the smell of slavery still about him, who in the district of Buxton in upper St Catherine, would walk five miles each way daily to the nearest church school to learn to read, honing his skills by Bible study when at home. He remembered a man who ground into his children and through them their children, the inestimable value of education: a married gentleman who founded several churches and, in the Jamaican countryside, instilled godly pride, humour and wisdom among people of his race and station in life.

They cohered around church, school and land, built community and cherished committed relationships. Fragile but enriching, this was Paul Bogle’s dream rising up, two or so generations after those terrified by the integrity and power of that dream, had murdered him.

Their lifestyle and value system was an indigenous, creole creation soon to be fractured beyond repair by cruel land law which forced urbanisation, the lure of migration and the waste of the bauxite rapine. Even among those who went abroad, their soul-case remained grounded in this land. None want to die or be buried in ‘foreign’.

That way of life is now the diminished remnant of a sacred past: the husk of a culture which can still produce loyal nationalists of Phyllis’ ilk. She was remembered as a woman who chose the life of her child rather than abort him when things got difficult: someone who found delight in sacrificial public service, always emphasising the power of educational achievement; something she had struggled to attain with such grit.

ADVANCING EDUCATION

It would be a great advance if in fact the Ministry of Education is able to deliver on the Minister’s promise to provide breakfast to students of the many hundreds of schools where pupils are grossly underperforming. To do so will require a thorough interrogation and re-purposing of how the $7 billion available for school feeding is spent.

The bulla and bag juice now distributed as a snack is enough to “move the gas” but is devoid of protein. At the schools to which I am attached, hot porridge is all we can afford. Can’t it be a priority of the agriculture sector which wastes perhaps 40 per cent of output in post-harvest loss, to provide an egg, a little milk or soy protein at least twice a week; some peas or beans regularly to ensure maximum learning uptake and good health. This is what I want debated in the Budget presentations in place of the tribal and egotistical drivel which often prevails.

STILL NOT ENOUGH

Studying this year’s projected expenditure, it is clear than despite our vaunted fiscal stability there is insufficient money for the great leap forward in effective schooling which the country desperately needs. Isn’t the government embarrassed that, on their own projections for the next half decade, economic growth (never mind its lack of inclusivity) is unlikely to advance more than a measly per cent annually and that to be ravaged by even the modest inflation which they over-optimistically project. That means most of us will end up poorer for their governance.

We should be ashamed of ourselves. Add to that the reality that much of what is available is spent ineffectively because educational reform will cause political fallout.

Parents should rise up and demand an end to the “free education” façade, prioritise their own contribution to their child’s school despite hard times, govern their children’s’ social media use and demand accountability for learning outcomes from schools. Nothing less than this intense attention on an individual basis will do.

BAD MIND

However benevolently they sound, the central authority is likely to be always behind the cusp of change and resistant to any initiative they do not originate. How else do you explain the effort last week by a high ministry of education official to publicly undermine a program of advancement in literacy which he has never visited, interrogated nor offered helpful critique.

We delight in getting in our own or each other’s way. That mentality is evil, not enriching.

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