Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today Inc.
by Ralph Jemmott
Professor Joel Warrican, Director of the School of Education at University of the West Indies Cave Hill, has accused the CARICOM Ministers of Education of hypocrisy.
The indictment charges that while being highly critical of CXC’s failure to alter the time and scope of this year’s
CSEC and CAPE examinations, in many of the territories the same persons were planning to proceed with the Common Entrance examination or its equivalents.
Firstly, it is amazing that a Professor of Education should make the ridiculous comparison between the Common Entrance test and the CSEC and CAPE Examinations.
In Barbados, the Common Entrance is a one day test of three papers, an Essay or composition, an English test followed by a break for lunch and then the Maths exam. By two o’clock the whole exam is completed.
CSEC now test some 32 disciplines, some involving laboratory practicum and orals. This can cover a period of a month or more.
Thus in terms of the COVID-19 threat to students there is absolutely no comparison. What would Professor Warrican have the Barbados Minister of Education do…. have no test at all this year? There are Class 4 children, some of whom are ready for the examination.
Why not let them go ahead and do the exam. Undoubtedly some are not ready, given the pandemic crisis. The Jamaican Minister of Education, Fayval Williams has stated that some 120, 000 children in primary and secondary schools are unaccounted for and could not be reached by education authorities in that country. This is no ordinary crisis and should be recognised as such.
All disadvantaged students who want to, should be allowed to repeat the year at CSEC, CAPE or Eleven Plus. We are not living in normal times and we cannot even be sure when ‘normality’ will return.
One would have thought that the present distress would have made the Professor Warricans of the world a bit more thoughtful. However it is obvious that Warrican, like many others, has a deeper problem with the Eleven Plus itself.
The Professor admits that the Common Entrance serves as a mechanism of transfer from primary to secondary school in many Caribbean territories. It carries different names.
In Trinidad, it is known as the Secondary Entrance Assessment Examination, and is also used as a mechanism of transfer, not dissimilar to what obtains in Barbados.
Certain schools such as Queen’s Royal College, Bishop Anstey, Trinity and St. Joseph Convent top a school system which is also hierarchically structured.
This hierarchy is not intentional, it has emerged over the years as some schools have acquired reputations as institutions of academic esteem.
School systems in most capitalist democratic countries which allow for parental choice are graded in terms of esteem, some more so than others. There is no such thing as parity of esteem in any democratic capitalist polity.
In Warrican’s terminology the Barbados Common Entrance and its regional equivalents constitute a ‘BEAST’. It continues to amaze me how so many intellectuals in the region, rather than think through the complexities of an issue, chose instead to ‘emote.’ Thus the 11-plus emerges in Warrican’s words as a ‘Beast.’ The Caribbean intelligentsia today is clearly not what it used to be.
The Common Entrance has existed in Barbados since 1959. Administrations of both stripes have failed to kill this terrifying Beast. In fact the good professor recognised it and its regional equivalents as an ostensibly ‘unshakeable and relied-on means’ of transfer from primary to secondary schooling.
The reality is that replacing the CSSEE is more complex and problematic than many assume. It is administratively problematic, it is socially problematic and it is politically problematic. If it were simple, the political leaderships in Barbados would have abolished the exam long ago.
In Barbados the only way to radically alter the transfer mechanism is to abolish parental choice altogether.
Parents would have to send their children where the Government says they must go or opt out of the public system and pay for private schooling.
That would be a ticklish political issue. Research has shown that if 50 per cent of Barbadian parents want to scrap the Eleven plus, the other 50 per cent would chose to retain it. That is one reason why over 62 years, neither political B or political D has chosen to make a radical change.
The other reason is that no one can be assured as to how structural education change of that magnitude would turn out given our recognised deficits in implementing even simple change. I once warned that you cannot destroy an educational edifice and build it back in three days.
The current administration was unquestionably hasty when it suggested that 2020 would be the last year for the Common Entrance.
Neither the Prime Minister nor the Education Minister seemed to have realised what that might entail even in normal time. Then COVID came along and upset the whole applecart.
Professor Warrican accuses the regional examiners of failing to find “creative ways” of certifying students. He concluded that CXC for example should come up with, get this, “friendlier models”
of certification. How friendly, one might ask? Hopefully a ‘friendly’ model would not threaten the accredited reputation of the examining body. We need, Warrican insists, to find ‘innovative ways’ of assessing students.
One would think that a Professor of Education would have been able to come up with at least one creative, friendly, innovative way of solving the examination and schooling dilemma in an age of a deadly virus that one suspects might be around for a long time.
It is amazing how many persons would instantly abolish the 11-plus, but after all the years virtually none has been able to come up with a workable, creative, friendly, innovative blueprint for the replacement of a Beast that according to them is the source of poverty, alienation, crime and violence and God knows what else.
Ralph Jemmott is a respected retired educator.
