Bruce Golding: Education biggest failure of Independence era

Asserting that Jamaica’s “biggest” failure since Independence is the education sector, former Prime Minister Bruce Golding says the nation’s future lies in the services industry.

Golding said the opening up of the education sector in the 1960s gave children of poor families access to secondary schools and opportunities similar to those from privileged backgrounds but not to quality education.

“Our education system has become a factory,” he told The Gleaner in an interview last Thursday.

He said that while some 50 institutions were built to give access to underserved children, the teachers recruited to those fledgling schools were not trained. That, Golding said, resulted in the pulling of teachers from primary schools to fill the void, leaving them without the “cadre of good educators”.

Students leaving secondary schools were not much more capable than when they entered, he said.

Citing the Professor Orlando Patterson-led Jamaica Education Transformation Commission report, Golding highlighted some key findings: 53 per cent of children who sat the Primary Exit Profile examination could not read; 56 per cent were not able to write; and 57 per cent were not able to identify information in a simple sentence.

Patterson said despite this, they were transitioned to the secondary level with no consideration as to whether they had attained mental acuity.

He said 41,000 children graduate from secondary schools each year with only half eligible to sit the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate examinations.

Of that 20,000, only 28 per cent attain passes in subjects, including mathematics and English, minimum requirements for many jobs.

“At the time of Independence, if you had what was then Senior Cambridge (General Certificate of Education), you could get a job as a teller in a bank. Today, if you’re to work as a teller in a bank, you have to have a university degree,” said Golding.

“So at a time when the qualifications for productive, rewarding employment are going up, we are producing 16 per cent of the kids out of high school that have that qualification. So it’s only 16 per cent that can go on to university. It’s only that 16 per cent that can turn up at an interview,” he added.

CONVEYOR-BELT SYSTEM

Golding said that in earlier years, students who did not perform at particular grade levels would have had to repeat those classes, but he noted that that practice has been replaced by a conveyor belt-type system.

But unlike a factory where a quality controller removes the rejects, Golding said the current process is left up to the potential employer.

“Now, our future lies not in manufacturing. We can’t compete with China. Our future lies not in oil and gas, because we don’t have that ... . Our future lies in services,” he said, pointing to the tourism sector as an example.

But that growth direction requires a serious training imperative, he said.

“That is our biggest area of failure. If you ask me where we have failed the most in 60 years of Independence, it’s that we have not provided the kind of education and training for young people,” he said, citing the late former Prime Minister Edward Seaga, who noted that there is no educated population that is poor.

Golding said that it was time the country “muscle up” in finding a common purpose.

He said for too long, there have been tiresome quarrels about who contributed more to the sector. The former prime minister said the Government must prepare to face down “the opponents of change”, singling out the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA).

Golding described the teachers’ union as one of the most powerful pressure groups in the country.

“They know how to play the Opposition and the Government against each other. If ever there was a time when Government and Opposition, and even the private sector, need to come together and say, ‘Look, this is our biggest problem and this is what we have to fix’ and face down those enemies of change, those enemies of reform, [it is now],” Golding argued.

kimone.francis@gleanerjm.com