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... all the better to divide & rule. The Politico/Business leadership is rotten to the core and taking Jamaica down with it. The misguided who bleat about "Education has to wait" ,,,while they applaud massive debt expenditure on roads...are themselves part of the problem... myopic in the extreme
Beyond pathetic
We have all failed Jamaica miserably
Wignall's World
MARK WIGNALL
Sunday, November 07, 2010
WHEN The Gleaner headline screamed two Thursdays ago, 'Half of Country's youth not ready for Schoolwork' it was a declaration that close to 50 years after gaining independence the political leadership of this country had failed us miserably.
Let us think of it for a while and let us savour the moment of our great shame. We need to cry shame on every grown man and woman in this country, but especially on those who have, in the last 50 years, risen up about once every five years with broad smiles on their faces and treacle on their lips begging us to empower them so that they can empower us.
According to the Gleaner article, "Robert Fuderich, UNICEF resident representative, says the figure was determined using the results of four school-readiness tests that were carried out by the Ministry of Education and the Early Childhood Commission, with the support of his team. Fuderich said the alarming statistics could be improved through the Early Childhood Development systems that are now in place."
The alarming finding may have surprised many, but I was not among them. All one had to do to determine the reality of the UNICEF representative's findings was move around the shops, bars and little corners of this country and listen to people, speak to them and the stark truth would jump out at you at every interaction.
Two Wednesdays ago, as I e-mailed my column to the Observer's Opinion Page editor I sent advance copies of it in my usual manner to four friends. Two in the US, one in Canada and the other in Jamaica. The Jamaican friend is Mike Williams, general secretary of the NDM.
My column was titled, 'No Easy Fix to Jamaica's hard times and Hopelessness'. By Wednesday night, Williams had sent me the following:
"Thanks for again highlighting the poor education system we have here... Andrew Holness will achieve little if he does not focus on Early Childhood Education.
"It's a pipe dream for full literacy by 2015 if that is not done. By YOUR own figures we continue to produce illiterates. We first have to stem the flow and that is not being done. Look at the figures again. About 60,000 babies born annually. On average about 40 per cent (24,000) of that number need governmental intervention."
When I asked him to define 'governmental intervention' he said, "They are too poor to provide for their baby. They need government support to enable the baby/child to develop mentally and physically to give each child an equal chance to develop to its best potential.
"They need that assistance from birth to say, five years old when the child will be going into the primary school system or until the parents are able to provide for their child on their own...The present PATH programme will be a good benchmark guide."
Of course, I can hear the do-gooders and armchair moralists telling me that poor people probably should not have sex, and very definitely should not produce babies. Well, the world is not made up that way. The fact is, if people are uneducated and irresponsible and they indulge in pleasurable acts like the rest of us and babies come as a result, those babies automatically become the responsibility of all of us.
If we frown upon the poor parents and say, 'They produced the babies, let them find their own way out' we are only fooling ourselves when many years later those babies become hoodlums sticking guns in our necks or young girls producing another round of babies all over again.
Williams continued: "The remaining 70 per cent - the parents can provide. Those who need help calculates to 400 per constituency on average. They can be helped if the will was there. Right now no specific curriculum exists for Early Childhood Education.
"It only requires the (real) 3 Rs — READING, REASONING & RESPECT. Teach all children from two-and-a-half to five plus those three things and you have a new generation of children who are smart and can make choices.
"By the time they are 11 years of age no politician can fool them and get them in bus or trucks to go to meetings. That would be the real preparation for an end to ghetto politics and garrisons. That is the real future.
"Now, what is being done in education? Do you know that the same person the PNP had heading the Early Childhood Education commission is the same person Minister Holness has there... Early Childhood Education is going nowhere. God help us."
It cannot be that just about every education specialist in Jamaica agrees that the focus ought to be on Early Childhood Education and yet the education ministry has no specific curriculum to address this. What madness is this?
About two years ago, a senior editor of a media house telephoned me and said, "Mark, you guys have to help young Andrew Holness. He means well and is working but he is surrounded by people who I believe are not on the same page as he is." I understood exactly what he meant.
According to the UNICEF representative, politics is at the heart of the decision to keep the focus on education at the tertiary level, which is now being accessed by less than 10 per cent of the students who had entered grade nine.
"A lot of the education investment is happening at the tertiary level because they are the most political, but it is at the earliest level that the platform is to be made so that when children enter into the schools they are strong and willing to learn."
Youngsters entering university — as deficient as too high a percentage of them are — are vocal, visible and are of voting age. Not so children of three or four, so our short-sighted politicians who can see no further than the next elections literally throw our young children on the dump heap of society and instead bring their focus to university guild elections where they are always hoping to find the next young tribalist. Such an utter shame!
For those who do not know, whenever guild elections are taking place on the campus of the UWI Mona, it is like a mini general election where active PNP and JLP politicians are involved, even to the level of funding. While they are indulging themselves they fool themselves in the belief that they are really wooing the cream of the crop.
In fact, the exercise is merely one where the failures are predetermined by an idiotic education system. Looking at it that way, it can even be said that many entry level university students are the 'what lef' in the education system.
The old system of the three Rs was supposed to cover 'Reading, Riting and Rithmetic'. Mike Williams suggests Reading, Reasoning and Respect. Even though something looks too convenient about the juxtaposition of those three Rs, they do in fact make a lot of sense. As Williams said, "Why do you believe our students are so weak on English Language and Mathematics. They are not properly taught to Read and Reason. You cannot tackle Math if you don't have a base in reasoning." Dead true.
In the context of the hurricane season, 1962, the year of our independence, was extremely kind to us. In that year not a single storm entered the Caribbean or was formed within it. We had three hurricanes — Alma, Daisy and Ella — and two tropical storms, Becky and Ella and they all floated up north. Of course, that was in the time when all hurricanes were given female names.
So while the gods were kind to us in 1962, unlike in 2010, our political leaders sold us out for political expediency. Mike Williams makes the point that if we should teach our young children Reading, Reasoning and the very important Respect, especially in the context that they come from poor, rural or inner city communities where respect only comes through the barrel of a gun, no politician could ever get them to jump on a bus and wax idiotic in the hope for a free T-shirt, a thousand dollar bill and a box lunch.
That ties into the belief that I have had over many years that the politics of this country has a systemic element which needs an assembly line producing crates upon crates of idiots. In other words, our politicians have a vested interest in making us all dumb and dumber, all the better to buy us a drink of rum and purchase our votes.
It is my hope that the UNICEF report will shame the present administration into moving its focus to the right area of the education spectrum -- Early Childhood Education. Minister Andrew Holness is not a part of the old wrecking crew of the political past, but he is the point man NOW and the education buck must stop with him.
The minister must allow the UNICEF report to personally bring shame to him because it has shamed me and I am not a part of his ministry. It has shamed me because I am a Jamaican.
Years ago I suggested that it's a foolish idea to place our failed politics and politicians in a barrel and roll it over a cliff because we cannot afford to ruin perfectly good barrels. Today however, I honestly feel that the barrel would not mind making that sacrifice for us.
Barbara Blake Hanna's recipe for education
In response to my 'No easy fix' column, Barbara Blake Hanna communicated with me by e-mail and suggested a sensible but radical shift from how our national educators have been treating this most important subject.
For those younger ones, Barbara is the daughter of the late journalist/magazine publisher Evon Blake, a man strong in every sense of the word.
In the 1950s when the multinational company United Fruit Company operated in the Caribbean and, of course, Jamaica, it owned a luxury hotel on Harbour Street called the Myrtle Bank Hotel.
One day Evon Blake jumped into the pool and immediately all the white people got out. As far as they were concerned, that black-skinned man had no right to be in the same pool as they were. The management intervened but what it wanted was for Blake to exit.
'No way,' said he. A compromise was struck when Blake said he would only exit when the white-skinned people re-entered the pool. They did, and on that day, way back in a sordid part of our memory, Evon Blake won.
Barbara has home-schooled her son and he is close to genius level. Her suggestion is this:
"I support your comments and questions about the state of Jamaica's illiteracy and the inability to find solutions to these problems. You say: 'And that presents us with Jamaica's biggest problem — tens of thousands of undereducated, unemployed men and women, many of whom have lost all hope. They all want a taste of the pie, as well they should; but being economically unviable, they have to resort to menial work, pressuring family members, begging, or turning to violent criminality.' SO TRUE!!!
"I commend the Ministry of Education for its untiring efforts to improve our literacy rate by providing more schools, more teachers, more students, more exams. But these have proved inadequate. In fact, it would seem impossible to accept that squeezing more meat into the crust will bake a better pie. Indeed, baking a better pie requires seasonings and other ingredients to complete the tasty whole.
"Likewise, I think it is necessary for our efforts at national literacy to include a variety of education options, some of which will be innovative and have a broad reach. For instance, we can consider a programme that teaches illiterate adults with babes-in-arms to read and teach the child at the same time — it's easy. We could have a Story Time, when a famous person reads to the nation episodes of a storybook distributed free to all who wish. We could use some of the Government TV and radio broadcast time for such daily programmes. We could have a competition for singers to compose the Times Tables 1-10.
"We could consider streaming boy students by interest, rather than grades in a common curriculum. Boys are interested in cars, computers, music, building things, growing things. Is there enough opportunity in the 'regular' curriculum for them to branch off and specialise in these skills at primary and secondary, without being sent to the lowly regarded 'technical' schools?
"There is a period between ages seven and 10 when children are at peak curiosity level and [are] still believing the world can be theirs. How are the opportunities to be trained to accomplish their future dreams being realised? How are they being enabled to use their curiosity to explore the outer limits of their creativity?
"In other words, if — like your friend Breshey — they cannot speak, who puts a paint brush or a guitar or a hammer in their hands, so they can survive?"
Recently Andre Campbell, son of Trevor Campbell of Caribbean Online Forum (both Jamaicans are California-based) made a presentation in Jamaica on the skills of imparting science-based subjects to young children.
As an educator Andre Campbell was a master on his mission. And it was so simple! All he did was utilise the fun aspect of what motivated children. He got them involved, had them moving around, flapping their hands like a butterfly would its wings and those kids were soaking up every moment of it.
Contrast that with the rote in our schools. Our poor teachers are so demotivated and seemingly unloved by the system which automatically expects them to design a new education push. With 50 per cent of our children unready, it is very obviously a huge and embarrassing failure.
Blake Hanna's suggestions and the proven efforts of Andre Campbell (Google him) must be embraced if we are serious about turning around this country in the next 20 years.
Responsibility of parents
Picture a young couple who can always source the funds to attend a dance but would have no idea what to do should a baby come.
Both are unemployed. The pleasures available to them are, for the man — a stick of weed, a beer, an energy drink, his woman. For her, it's music, dancing, her cellphone.
They leave a dance one morning at 6:30 then go home and have sex. Nine months later a baby is born. The young man tells his friends that 'me get a baby', never 'me have a baby'. Too many Jamaican men provide themselves with this disconnect, that somehow, the baby was 'had', never jointly created.
Once the man moves his mind in that direction, he frees himself of the responsibility that ought to happen automatically. In that way he can move on to another dance, another young woman and 'get' another baby.
Some would suggest that laws ought to be instituted to curtail the breeding patterns of poor people. Hogwash!
In an educated population, it is people who put a brake on themselves. Some others would suggest that it is that great sense of humour that God has that has made Him give the poorest the greatest procreative production line.
I have a friend, a taxi driver, who 'get' 14 children, and surprise... he actually looks after them. Last week when we spoke he said, "A just di two last one dem now. Di res a dem grow big. But Missa Mark, something mussa wrong wid me. If mi kiss a woman, she breed." Of course, I had to laugh, long too.
"Mi go pon di road last night and di whole night mi couldn't mek di two lunch money. Is a lucky ting mi did put down something," he said.
He is of course an irresponsible man to the extent that 14 children must at some stage hobble free tuition in school, must at another stage add to the overstressed free health care system. But it is admirable that he has struggled and has never sought handouts in raising them (and in bobbing and weaving his way through five 'baby mothers').
The pleasures of the young couple in the form of a child is a charge on the state. "We have to begin somewhere," said Mike Williams to me. "Sure there will be some who will fall outside any new push in Early Childhood Education but we have to start now if we are serious about building a new Jamaica."
Beyond pathetic
We have all failed Jamaica miserably
Wignall's World
MARK WIGNALL
Sunday, November 07, 2010
WHEN The Gleaner headline screamed two Thursdays ago, 'Half of Country's youth not ready for Schoolwork' it was a declaration that close to 50 years after gaining independence the political leadership of this country had failed us miserably.
Let us think of it for a while and let us savour the moment of our great shame. We need to cry shame on every grown man and woman in this country, but especially on those who have, in the last 50 years, risen up about once every five years with broad smiles on their faces and treacle on their lips begging us to empower them so that they can empower us.
According to the Gleaner article, "Robert Fuderich, UNICEF resident representative, says the figure was determined using the results of four school-readiness tests that were carried out by the Ministry of Education and the Early Childhood Commission, with the support of his team. Fuderich said the alarming statistics could be improved through the Early Childhood Development systems that are now in place."
The alarming finding may have surprised many, but I was not among them. All one had to do to determine the reality of the UNICEF representative's findings was move around the shops, bars and little corners of this country and listen to people, speak to them and the stark truth would jump out at you at every interaction.
Two Wednesdays ago, as I e-mailed my column to the Observer's Opinion Page editor I sent advance copies of it in my usual manner to four friends. Two in the US, one in Canada and the other in Jamaica. The Jamaican friend is Mike Williams, general secretary of the NDM.
My column was titled, 'No Easy Fix to Jamaica's hard times and Hopelessness'. By Wednesday night, Williams had sent me the following:
"Thanks for again highlighting the poor education system we have here... Andrew Holness will achieve little if he does not focus on Early Childhood Education.
"It's a pipe dream for full literacy by 2015 if that is not done. By YOUR own figures we continue to produce illiterates. We first have to stem the flow and that is not being done. Look at the figures again. About 60,000 babies born annually. On average about 40 per cent (24,000) of that number need governmental intervention."
When I asked him to define 'governmental intervention' he said, "They are too poor to provide for their baby. They need government support to enable the baby/child to develop mentally and physically to give each child an equal chance to develop to its best potential.
"They need that assistance from birth to say, five years old when the child will be going into the primary school system or until the parents are able to provide for their child on their own...The present PATH programme will be a good benchmark guide."
Of course, I can hear the do-gooders and armchair moralists telling me that poor people probably should not have sex, and very definitely should not produce babies. Well, the world is not made up that way. The fact is, if people are uneducated and irresponsible and they indulge in pleasurable acts like the rest of us and babies come as a result, those babies automatically become the responsibility of all of us.
If we frown upon the poor parents and say, 'They produced the babies, let them find their own way out' we are only fooling ourselves when many years later those babies become hoodlums sticking guns in our necks or young girls producing another round of babies all over again.
Williams continued: "The remaining 70 per cent - the parents can provide. Those who need help calculates to 400 per constituency on average. They can be helped if the will was there. Right now no specific curriculum exists for Early Childhood Education.
"It only requires the (real) 3 Rs — READING, REASONING & RESPECT. Teach all children from two-and-a-half to five plus those three things and you have a new generation of children who are smart and can make choices.
"By the time they are 11 years of age no politician can fool them and get them in bus or trucks to go to meetings. That would be the real preparation for an end to ghetto politics and garrisons. That is the real future.
"Now, what is being done in education? Do you know that the same person the PNP had heading the Early Childhood Education commission is the same person Minister Holness has there... Early Childhood Education is going nowhere. God help us."
It cannot be that just about every education specialist in Jamaica agrees that the focus ought to be on Early Childhood Education and yet the education ministry has no specific curriculum to address this. What madness is this?
About two years ago, a senior editor of a media house telephoned me and said, "Mark, you guys have to help young Andrew Holness. He means well and is working but he is surrounded by people who I believe are not on the same page as he is." I understood exactly what he meant.
According to the UNICEF representative, politics is at the heart of the decision to keep the focus on education at the tertiary level, which is now being accessed by less than 10 per cent of the students who had entered grade nine.
"A lot of the education investment is happening at the tertiary level because they are the most political, but it is at the earliest level that the platform is to be made so that when children enter into the schools they are strong and willing to learn."
Youngsters entering university — as deficient as too high a percentage of them are — are vocal, visible and are of voting age. Not so children of three or four, so our short-sighted politicians who can see no further than the next elections literally throw our young children on the dump heap of society and instead bring their focus to university guild elections where they are always hoping to find the next young tribalist. Such an utter shame!
For those who do not know, whenever guild elections are taking place on the campus of the UWI Mona, it is like a mini general election where active PNP and JLP politicians are involved, even to the level of funding. While they are indulging themselves they fool themselves in the belief that they are really wooing the cream of the crop.
In fact, the exercise is merely one where the failures are predetermined by an idiotic education system. Looking at it that way, it can even be said that many entry level university students are the 'what lef' in the education system.
The old system of the three Rs was supposed to cover 'Reading, Riting and Rithmetic'. Mike Williams suggests Reading, Reasoning and Respect. Even though something looks too convenient about the juxtaposition of those three Rs, they do in fact make a lot of sense. As Williams said, "Why do you believe our students are so weak on English Language and Mathematics. They are not properly taught to Read and Reason. You cannot tackle Math if you don't have a base in reasoning." Dead true.
In the context of the hurricane season, 1962, the year of our independence, was extremely kind to us. In that year not a single storm entered the Caribbean or was formed within it. We had three hurricanes — Alma, Daisy and Ella — and two tropical storms, Becky and Ella and they all floated up north. Of course, that was in the time when all hurricanes were given female names.
So while the gods were kind to us in 1962, unlike in 2010, our political leaders sold us out for political expediency. Mike Williams makes the point that if we should teach our young children Reading, Reasoning and the very important Respect, especially in the context that they come from poor, rural or inner city communities where respect only comes through the barrel of a gun, no politician could ever get them to jump on a bus and wax idiotic in the hope for a free T-shirt, a thousand dollar bill and a box lunch.
That ties into the belief that I have had over many years that the politics of this country has a systemic element which needs an assembly line producing crates upon crates of idiots. In other words, our politicians have a vested interest in making us all dumb and dumber, all the better to buy us a drink of rum and purchase our votes.
It is my hope that the UNICEF report will shame the present administration into moving its focus to the right area of the education spectrum -- Early Childhood Education. Minister Andrew Holness is not a part of the old wrecking crew of the political past, but he is the point man NOW and the education buck must stop with him.
The minister must allow the UNICEF report to personally bring shame to him because it has shamed me and I am not a part of his ministry. It has shamed me because I am a Jamaican.
Years ago I suggested that it's a foolish idea to place our failed politics and politicians in a barrel and roll it over a cliff because we cannot afford to ruin perfectly good barrels. Today however, I honestly feel that the barrel would not mind making that sacrifice for us.
Barbara Blake Hanna's recipe for education
In response to my 'No easy fix' column, Barbara Blake Hanna communicated with me by e-mail and suggested a sensible but radical shift from how our national educators have been treating this most important subject.
For those younger ones, Barbara is the daughter of the late journalist/magazine publisher Evon Blake, a man strong in every sense of the word.
In the 1950s when the multinational company United Fruit Company operated in the Caribbean and, of course, Jamaica, it owned a luxury hotel on Harbour Street called the Myrtle Bank Hotel.
One day Evon Blake jumped into the pool and immediately all the white people got out. As far as they were concerned, that black-skinned man had no right to be in the same pool as they were. The management intervened but what it wanted was for Blake to exit.
'No way,' said he. A compromise was struck when Blake said he would only exit when the white-skinned people re-entered the pool. They did, and on that day, way back in a sordid part of our memory, Evon Blake won.
Barbara has home-schooled her son and he is close to genius level. Her suggestion is this:
"I support your comments and questions about the state of Jamaica's illiteracy and the inability to find solutions to these problems. You say: 'And that presents us with Jamaica's biggest problem — tens of thousands of undereducated, unemployed men and women, many of whom have lost all hope. They all want a taste of the pie, as well they should; but being economically unviable, they have to resort to menial work, pressuring family members, begging, or turning to violent criminality.' SO TRUE!!!
"I commend the Ministry of Education for its untiring efforts to improve our literacy rate by providing more schools, more teachers, more students, more exams. But these have proved inadequate. In fact, it would seem impossible to accept that squeezing more meat into the crust will bake a better pie. Indeed, baking a better pie requires seasonings and other ingredients to complete the tasty whole.
"Likewise, I think it is necessary for our efforts at national literacy to include a variety of education options, some of which will be innovative and have a broad reach. For instance, we can consider a programme that teaches illiterate adults with babes-in-arms to read and teach the child at the same time — it's easy. We could have a Story Time, when a famous person reads to the nation episodes of a storybook distributed free to all who wish. We could use some of the Government TV and radio broadcast time for such daily programmes. We could have a competition for singers to compose the Times Tables 1-10.
"We could consider streaming boy students by interest, rather than grades in a common curriculum. Boys are interested in cars, computers, music, building things, growing things. Is there enough opportunity in the 'regular' curriculum for them to branch off and specialise in these skills at primary and secondary, without being sent to the lowly regarded 'technical' schools?
"There is a period between ages seven and 10 when children are at peak curiosity level and [are] still believing the world can be theirs. How are the opportunities to be trained to accomplish their future dreams being realised? How are they being enabled to use their curiosity to explore the outer limits of their creativity?
"In other words, if — like your friend Breshey — they cannot speak, who puts a paint brush or a guitar or a hammer in their hands, so they can survive?"
Recently Andre Campbell, son of Trevor Campbell of Caribbean Online Forum (both Jamaicans are California-based) made a presentation in Jamaica on the skills of imparting science-based subjects to young children.
As an educator Andre Campbell was a master on his mission. And it was so simple! All he did was utilise the fun aspect of what motivated children. He got them involved, had them moving around, flapping their hands like a butterfly would its wings and those kids were soaking up every moment of it.
Contrast that with the rote in our schools. Our poor teachers are so demotivated and seemingly unloved by the system which automatically expects them to design a new education push. With 50 per cent of our children unready, it is very obviously a huge and embarrassing failure.
Blake Hanna's suggestions and the proven efforts of Andre Campbell (Google him) must be embraced if we are serious about turning around this country in the next 20 years.
Responsibility of parents
Picture a young couple who can always source the funds to attend a dance but would have no idea what to do should a baby come.
Both are unemployed. The pleasures available to them are, for the man — a stick of weed, a beer, an energy drink, his woman. For her, it's music, dancing, her cellphone.
They leave a dance one morning at 6:30 then go home and have sex. Nine months later a baby is born. The young man tells his friends that 'me get a baby', never 'me have a baby'. Too many Jamaican men provide themselves with this disconnect, that somehow, the baby was 'had', never jointly created.
Once the man moves his mind in that direction, he frees himself of the responsibility that ought to happen automatically. In that way he can move on to another dance, another young woman and 'get' another baby.
Some would suggest that laws ought to be instituted to curtail the breeding patterns of poor people. Hogwash!
In an educated population, it is people who put a brake on themselves. Some others would suggest that it is that great sense of humour that God has that has made Him give the poorest the greatest procreative production line.
I have a friend, a taxi driver, who 'get' 14 children, and surprise... he actually looks after them. Last week when we spoke he said, "A just di two last one dem now. Di res a dem grow big. But Missa Mark, something mussa wrong wid me. If mi kiss a woman, she breed." Of course, I had to laugh, long too.
"Mi go pon di road last night and di whole night mi couldn't mek di two lunch money. Is a lucky ting mi did put down something," he said.
He is of course an irresponsible man to the extent that 14 children must at some stage hobble free tuition in school, must at another stage add to the overstressed free health care system. But it is admirable that he has struggled and has never sought handouts in raising them (and in bobbing and weaving his way through five 'baby mothers').
The pleasures of the young couple in the form of a child is a charge on the state. "We have to begin somewhere," said Mike Williams to me. "Sure there will be some who will fall outside any new push in Early Childhood Education but we have to start now if we are serious about building a new Jamaica."
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