To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

Deep dif­fi­cul­ties in ed­u­ca­tion in­volv­ing in­sti­tu­tion­alised un­der­achieve­ment by males, the need for greater eq­ui­ty in the sys­tem, se­ri­ous fail­ure of the sys­tem to pro­duce suf­fi­cient of a core of grad­u­ates for ad­vanced train­ing and to meet the needs of the work­place are ed­u­ca­tion­al is­sues which have been qui­et­ly raised re­cent­ly and have not re­ceived a lot of me­dia at­ten­tion.

The first state­ment of alarm came a few weeks ago from for­mer Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Hazel Man­ning when she told a news­pa­per in­ter­view­er that a mere 30 per cent of sec­ondary school stu­dents emerge from the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem with a full cer­tifi­cate (tra­di­tion­al­ly a full cer­tifi­cate means five pass­es at the CSEC lev­el). On­ly a cou­ple days ago, the present Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion, Es­ther Le Gen­dre, said while the Gov­ern­ment has been able to place al­most 100 per cent of stu­dents in­to the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary school sys­tem, the re­al chal­lenges have to do with qual­i­ty of the ed­u­ca­tion re­ceived and eq­ui­ty in ed­u­ca­tion.

"The chal­lenge for us there­fore is the progress from en­sur­ing equal par­tic­i­pa­tion and qual­i­ty. Eq­ui­ty, which speaks to con­sid­er­a­tions of gen­der, so­cio-eco­nom­ic sta­tus, eth­nic­i­ty and race, lan­guage and en­vi­ron­ment, is one of the bases of qual­i­ty de­ter­mi­na­tion as de­fined by Un­esco," said Min­is­ter Le Gen­dre. The min­is­ter al­so re­vealed that the cur­ricu­lum con­tin­ues to be de­fi­cient in meet­ing the ed­u­ca­tion­al dis­po­si­tion and needs of boys, the re­sult be­ing that young males are falling be­hind their fe­male coun­ter­parts. Be­gin­ning with the UNC gov­ern­ment and con­tin­u­ing ag­gres­sive­ly with the present PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion, there has been sig­nif­i­cant and suc­cess­ful ef­fort to pro­vide places for all chil­dren at the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary lev­els.

The present Gov­ern­ment is now in the process of es­tab­lish­ing ear­ly child­hood care cen­tres in dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try, and re­pair and con­struc­tion of the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools con­tin­ues. Those ef­forts will in­evitably take care of the de­mand for uni­ver­sal pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary school ed­u­ca­tion. But as is clear, the coun­try can ill-af­ford for 70 per cent of its young pop­u­la­tion to not be able to suc­cess­ful­ly nav­i­gate the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem and so be­come train­able to work at ad­vance lev­els in in­dus­try and com­merce. The de­vel­oped coun­try sta­tus that the Gov­ern­ment is as­pir­ing to will not be achieved with­out the tech­ni­cians, en­gi­neers, re­search sci­en­tists, busi­ness en­tre­pre­neurs, aca­d­e­mics, med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, artists and all the oth­er cat­e­gories of work­ers that are re­quired in suf­fi­cient mass to stim­u­late de­vel­op­ment.

The un­bal­anced ed­u­ca­tion­al de­vel­op­ment be­tween males and fe­males, the clear­ly ge­o­graph­i­cal in­equity in ed­u­ca­tion­al achieve­ment, with its so­cial class dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, are par­tic­u­lar­ly wor­ri­some mat­ters. So­cial sta­bil­i­ty and har­mo­nious re­la­tions be­tween and amongst the so­cial and eco­nom­ic stra­ta of so­ci­ety are at stake here. It is the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem which has the po­ten­tial for hu­man de­vel­op­ment and es­pe­cial­ly mo­bil­i­ty in the so­ci­ety–so­cial­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly de­prived peo­ple be­ing able to ad­vance through the ac­qui­si­tion of an ed­u­ca­tion to lift them­selves and fam­i­lies out of gen­er­a­tional pover­ty.

Un­doubt­ed­ly, the present crim­i­nal­i­ty ram­pant in the so­ci­ety is be­ing fu­elled in part by sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of that 70 per cent of stu­dents who do not suc­cess­ful­ly make it through the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem. Hav­ing not achieved the ba­sics, un­able to hold down jobs, it is prov­ing all too easy for young peo­ple, es­pe­cial­ly "the lost males," to get in­to the "wrong groove." There is need for a dras­tic over­haul of the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem–tin­ker­ing here and there will not achieve the kind of fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tion re­quired to re-en­gage young males in ed­u­ca­tion–to en­sure that there is a larg­er per­cent­age of our stu­dents who qual­i­fy for the high­er sec­ondary and ter­tiary lev­els of ed­u­ca­tion and skills train­ing.