“We must do far more to advance Sustainable Development Goal 4, to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” (UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres).
On Friday 24 January the world will observe the International Day of Education. The UN states, the 2020 theme Learning for people, planet, prosperity and peace, “highlights the integrated nature of education, its humanistic aims, as well as its centrality to our collective development ambitions. It also gives stakeholders and partners flexibility to tailor the celebration for diverse audiences, a variety of contexts and for priority themes.”
The observance of this day comes at a time when our neighbour, Barbados, is determined to remove the Common Entrance Examination and to find other means of assessing students as they move from primary to secondary schools. The International Association for Educational Assessment states that this examination is “a colonial holdover from as early as 1879 in some territories. Though renamed and restructured several times, they have remained as what many experts deem an irrelevant, stress-inducing test that sucks the joy out of learning for eleven-year-olds region-wide.”
Hon Mia Mottley, PM, Barbados speaks about creating schools of excellence and of creating an education system that is more diverse and that offers equitable opportunities to students. In October 2019, Colville Mounsey reported that vice-president of the Barbados Secondary Teachers’ Union, Leslie Lett, had said: “Whether we like it or not, the system is producing an educational apartheid. This 11-plus exam is anything but equitable. We know this because we heard the police say recently that there were seven schools which provide the population of Dodds prison. People ask why did they come from these schools, instead of asking why they went there in the first place…
“We might be spending all of this money on education but yet we have within the system, things that are undermining the efficacy of what we are spending. So, we are actually shooting ourselves in the foot and I am speaking about the Common Entrance exam… Why do we have this iniquitous thing when there are enough secondary school places in Barbados? It has no pedagogical benefit or basis; it is simply a placement exam…
“We want to create a society where our young people have the aspiration to be productive members of society, yet we are putting them, from an early age, into a swimming pool filled with gravel and expecting them to swim. From a young age these children realise that there is a certain hierarchy within the secondary school system. For some their uniform is a badge of honour while for others, theirs is a badge of shame and dishonour. If at 11 years-old we are putting this in their mind, then what do we expect them to grow up to be.” Mounsey noted that Lett’s criticism of the exam was not so much about the test applied on the day but rather the culture which it spawned later down the road.
Lett’s words apply to us in TT also. Although our Minister of Education stated recently that: “If we are to abolish the SEA exam at this stage, it means that we will have to find an alternative method of transitioning students from primary to secondary school. We have been looking at this for some time now and we are yet to come up with a formula without running into problems with the church and with respect to the parent’s right to choose.”
Are we doing enough to empower our people – even those in areas such as Laventille, Maloney etc. and shape our culture through education? Can we truly say that our education system is geared to promote the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that students of all ages need to prepare them for life, work and citizenship? I agreed with Her Excellency, President Paula-Mae Weekes, when she said in 2018, that: “…it is time to do a complete overhaul of the education system if we are to have any chance of producing the individuals that we want and need to lead this country into the future”.
While parents have to play their part in the education/development of their children, society cannot abrogate responsibility. Do we need to focus more on morals, values, virtues, ethics, citizenship? And talking about domestic violence, Tage Rai rightly says: “It isn’t easy to change a culture of violence. You have to give people the structural, economic, technological and political means to regulate their relationships peacefully.”
First Publishing in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian
