#BTColumn – Educational change

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY. 

by Ralph Jemmott

It is clear from the President’s Speech at the opening of the new session of the Barbados Parliament that it is Government’s intention to embark on an appreciably significant measure of education reform.

If the speech is anything to go by, the reforms envisaged will affect both the structure and content of our schooling system. Persons informed and less informed have wanted to reform Barbados education for some time and there has been no shortage of ideas.

One of the most often quoted intentions has been “to bring Barbados into the 21st century”, whatever that mean. People will obviously have different ideas on our present conditions and on a future that none of us cannot truly know.

Fundamental change to a schooling structure can be complicated and must be carefully thought out as it will have far reaching consequences for the future.

It should not be the object or subject of symbolism as so much of Barbados is becoming.

To take down Nelson is one thing, to dismantle and reconstruct an education structure is a far more complex and difficult task. You can’t push it in a hole in the museum and decide what you are going to do with it at a later date.

The problem of education reform is that persons, stakeholders if you wish, invariably want different outcomes from schooling, outcomes suited to their own purposes. Most parents want to see their own children advance in the world financially and socially.

A parent once said that we should abolish School and Inter-School sports. When asked why, she replied, “well my child don’t run.” Presumably the school her child attended was built solely to suit her particular child. She clearly has no perception of nor interest in Barbados’ wider educational societal needs.

Today many want education for economic development, for the so-called “world of work”, putting it crudely “to make money” or more intellectually speaking, to service market capitalism for its individual and collective rewards. There is nothing working with that objective. However, it would be tragically myopic to see that as the prime or only objective of any reform program.

Still others like myself trained in the humanities and the social sciences see schooling more as a design for living, for the improvement of the human condition of which servicing our material needs is only a part. Charles Silberman’s classic text

‘Crisis in the Classroom’ outlines the three perennial goals of formal schooling.

The first is the advancement of human “Cognition” in all its various forms. The second is “Operacy”, the capacity “to do”, that is, to put knowledge and cognition to practical use.

The third is “Sensibility” or the capacity “to be”, particularly in the moral sense of being.

The inculcation of moral intelligence is a key imperative of formal schooling. Whatever the practical needs of Barbadian society, it is vital that we cling to some notion of a liberal education that develops the mind in fashioning what the Canadian intellectual Northrop Frye called “a vision of the ideal word we seek to create.”

We are losing our perception of that vision. Now it seems as if everything is reducible to teaching coding and robotics, presumably to open a new sector of economic growth if that is possible.

There is even talk of introducing coding and robotics into the primary curriculum at a time when evidence suggests that a not unappreciable number of our children are leaving the primary sector having failed to master the required numeracy, literacy and oral skills.

One has some serious fears about the focus of education reform in Barbados. One is that as we move more to an emphasis on science and technology there will be an increasing tendency to pre-empt the humanising liberal elements in the curriculum at a time when Caribbean society as a whole is witnessing greater evidence of societal breakdown.

More than ever before the school must return to its acculturating mission. A former lecturer in the School of Education once observed that too many young males were leaving school “untouched by the civilising influences of Home, Church or School, unemployed and unemployable.”

It seems to me that Barbados like much of the globalised world is facing a crisis of moral failure. Maybe it is the material thrust of globalised capital that is eroding empathy, trust and kindness.

I support capitalism but capitalism is based on competition which if it comes excessively, can diminish our humanity. The Biblical mantra that it is impossible to serve God and Mammon is on the face of it true. As we age we become acutely conscious of the transience of life and of the vanity of “the things that are not bread and that satisfieth not.”

Persons who talk glibly about education reform and effecting “a learning revolution” tend to avoid the reality that formal schooling takes place within a societal culture that can either facilitate or retard learning development. If the material culture and the values, attitudes and sensibilities in the wider culture run considerably counter to the mission of the school, all the structural and content alterations may not be able to effect the qualitative outcomes hoped for.

Ralph Jemmott is a respected retired educator.