Lisa Allen-Agos­ti­ni

On June 28 I was priv­i­leged to be a judge in the Youth Speak Out, a pub­lic speak­ing con­test held by the non-prof­it vo­ca­tion­al ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tute Ser­vol. The Cen­tral East Zon­al fi­nals, held at the Ser­vol Ch­agua­nas Hi-Tech Au­di­to­ri­um, pit­ted four speak­ers against each oth­er. Each speak­er chose a top­ic in ad­vance and pre­pared an eight-minute speech on her or his top­ic.I have to con­grat­u­late the teach­ers of the Ado­les­cent De­vel­op­ment Pro­gramme (ADP), un­der whose guid­ance the stu­dents learned pub­lic speak­ing and de­vel­oped their speech­es.On Fri­day I heard four very good speech­es de­liv­ered by four well-pre­pared speak­ers. They all did a mar­vel­lous job, and I'm not just say­ing that to be nice.Re­tired school prin­ci­pal Gre­go­ry Julien was head judge, vet­er­an jour­nal­ist Ver­non Khelawan was the fi­nal judge, and we all agreed we were pleas­ant­ly sur­prised at the high qual­i­ty of the pre­sen­ta­tions.

Our sur­prise was not an in­dict­ment of Ser­vol or its stu­dents, but rather an ac­knowl­edge­ment that young peo­ple in our coun­try to­day seem to be gen­er­al­ly inar­tic­u­late and un­able to con­fi­dent­ly de­liv­er a well-struc­tured, thor­ough­ly re­searched pre­sen­ta­tion. There is some­thing miss­ing in our ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem on the whole, some gap be­tween the teach­ing of Eng­lish and pub­lic speak­ing, so that when one comes across a young per­son who can fear­less­ly stand in front of an au­di­ence and de­liv­er a strong eight-minute speech, it is dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly im­pres­sive to the au­di­ence.I'm not sure what's caus­ing the gap, but it ex­ists in many schools, not on­ly the for­mer ju­nior and se­nior secs and vo­ca­tion­al schools such as Ser­vol. I've met stu­dents who have grad­u­at­ed from gram­mar-type schools un­able to do cred­i­ble re­search on a top­ic, un­able to write and struc­ture a pre­sen­ta­tion, and un­able to de­liv­er said pre­sen­ta­tion. That is one of the rea­sons it was such a plea­sure to lis­ten to the four com­peti­tors on Fri­day, who all in­tro­duced their speech­es with suit­able quo­ta­tions or per­ti­nent sta­tis­tics, and by and large con­fi­dent­ly went through their pre­sen­ta­tions.

Cer­tain­ly, they weren't per­fect–for ex­am­ple, they read their speech­es, while the best speech­es are de­liv­ered from notes and not read word for word. (But in this I could hard­ly fault them, as I my­self pre­fer to read my own speech­es. I of­ten say I'm a writer, not a talk­er.) The speak­ers, like many T&T peo­ple, had clear trou­ble with the "-ed" end­ing and the "th-" be­gin­ning of some words. This, while per­fect­ly ac­cept­able in Cre­ole speech, is not ac­cept­able in Stan­dard Eng­lish, in which these pre­sen­ta­tions were de­liv­ered.In one case, the sources of much of the re­searched in­for­ma­tion in the speech were not cred­it­ed, caus­ing a loss of points be­cause of the eth­i­cal con­cerns such omis­sions raise. But, on the whole, these four young peo­ple from the Arou­ca, Ch­agua­nas, Ari­ma and St An­drew's Re­gion­al Life Cen­tres ac­quit­ted them­selves more than ho­n­ourably.In fact, these stu­dents did so well that I would sug­gest to the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion that it ex­am­ine the Ser­vol ADP cur­ricu­lum with a view to adapt­ing it to the gen­er­al cur­ricu­lum of sec­ondary schools in T&T. The top­ics taught un­der ADP–self-aware­ness, par­ent­ing, spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, peer coun­sel­ing, in­tel­lec­tu­al and phys­i­cal de­vel­op­ment, and so­cial and cre­ative aware­ness–could well prove use­ful to all our stu­dents, not just the vo­ca­tion­al stu­dents of Ser­vol. That these four young adults de­liv­ered cred­i­ble, thought­ful pre­sen­ta­tions on top­ics in­clud­ing child abuse, bul­ly­ing, and teen vi­o­lence made me feel hope­ful that all is not lost for this X-Box gen­er­a­tion.

I take this op­por­tu­ni­ty to laud the teach­ers and staff of Ser­vol, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the above-men­tioned cen­tres, who are do­ing such a good job in train­ing young peo­ple for life as well as work. These four young peo­ple might nev­er have to de­liv­er pre­sen­ta­tions in their day-to-day lives, but the dis­ci­pline and self-con­fi­dence af­ford­ed by the prepa­ra­tion to give their speech­es in front of an au­di­ence of strangers could go far.There are many sit­u­a­tions in which one needs to ex­press one's thoughts and in­formed opin­ions. I'm not just think­ing about job in­ter­views, al­though those cer­tain­ly come to mind. I'm talk­ing about be­ing able to con­sid­er, re­search and dis­cuss any is­sue–like pol­i­tics, con­sumer rights, crime and pun­ish­ment, or re­li­gion.This is one skill that stands a per­son in good stead any­where, be it in a rumshop, on the block or in Bible study class.And might I sug­gest that had some of our par­lia­men­tar­i­ans done the ADP we might have had a bet­ter lev­el of dis­course in the Low­er House?