Jabari Frais­er

The syl­labus­es of 11 Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tions Coun­cil (CXC) sub­jects are to be re­formed dras­ti­cal­ly. The de­ci­sion was tak­en yes­ter­day at the In­sti­tute of Crit­i­cal Think­ing at UWI, St Au­gus­tine. .

In­sti­tute di­rec­tor Dr Bhoe Tewarie and Dr Di­da­cus Jules, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of CXC, signed an agree­ment be­tween the two re­gion­al ed­u­ca­tion in­sti­tutes, aimed at pro­duc­ing bet­ter stu­dents adept at crit­i­cal think­ing.

Jules said the col­lab­o­ra­tion was fo­cused on ex­e­cut­ing a "par­a­digm shift from rote learn­ing and re­gur­gi­ta­tion to re­al think­ing." Jules said a main fac­tor trig­ger­ing the up­com­ing re­forms was a call from so­ci­ety for the CXC sys­tems to pro­duce peo­ple ca­pa­ble of mak­ing mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tions to so­ci­ety.

"Over the last ten years, re­gion­al min­istries and al­so the pri­vate sec­tor have been call­ing for a dif­fer­ent type of out­put by ex­am­i­na­tion boards." He said com­pa­nies were seek­ing think­ing work­ers. "Em­ploy­ers are say­ing they want peo­ple with a ca­pac­i­ty to ap­ply their knowl­edge." Tewarie, al­so Pro Vice-Chan­cel­lor of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment, not­ed that var­i­ous UWI fac­ul­ties and lec­tur­ers would be in­volved in the re­form, to al­low for easy tran­si­tion in­to the ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem and to get stu­dents think­ing be­fore they en­tered uni­ver­si­ty.

"Crit­i­cal think­ing needs to start ear­ly, ide­al­ly in pri­ma­ry school, af­ter pre-school ex­po­sure has in­stilled self-con­fi­dence as well as cre­ativ­i­ty in the child." He al­so not­ed that new teach­ing meth­ods would have to be im­ple­ment­ed, and that the process had al­ready start­ed with the School of Ed­u­ca­tion at the UWI in Mona, Ja­maica. The pi­lot project, to be con­duct­ed over the next two years, would fo­cus on the fol­low­ing sub­ject ar­eas: Caribbean Sec­ondary Ex­am­i­na­tion Cer­tifi­cate (CSEC) lev­el, Math­e­mat­ics, Physics, Bi­ol­o­gy, In­te­grat­ed Sci­ence, Eco­nom­ics, Caribbean His­to­ry, Ge­og­ra­phy, So­cial Stud­ies, Prin­ci­ples of Busi­ness, and Eng­lish A (Lan­guage) and B (Lit­er­a­ture). The 11th area is Lit­er­a­ture in Eng­lish at the Caribbean Ad­vanced Pro­fi­cien­cy (Cape) lev­el.