President of the Barbados Evangelical Association (BEA) Dr Nigel Taylor has questioned the rationale behind the highly controversial Computer Science pretest given to 11-year-olds.
In an interview with Barbados TODAY, he said he was “very concerned” with the recent revelation that first-form secondary school students were asked questions about their sexuality and gender identity in the test which was administered by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and sanctioned by the Ministry of Education, Technological and Vocational Training.
He said he had been inundated with calls from the BEA’s 60 000 membership ever since the news broke that the minors had been made to take the test without their parents’ knowledge.
Dr Taylor said he was at a loss as to the reasoning behind asking such inappropriate questions.
“Having seen the questions, it is concerning. It really is concerning on multiple points. It also shows that one must always have a degree of integrity when you are coming to the Barbadian public and, ever so often, we cannot simply allow people to use a guise to formulate any opinion that they simply want us to follow,” he said.
“I am yet to understand how the whole set of questions relate to anything relating to a pretest in Computer Science…If you are going to be invasive in terms of asking questions that can be leading or questions that can facilitate answers that perhaps the same child is not aware, you can’t just go and ask the people’s children those sorts of things. If you are going to run a survey for the purpose of gathering empirical data, what was the reasoning for this survey? It begs the question, has the Ministry been aware or can the Ministry tell me what is the reasoning behind the empirical data being gathered to formulate what kind of conclusion?
Dr Taylor added: “I need to find out the reasoning, because if you’re going to break the parental responsibility, if you’re going to infringe on the rights of the child, if you’re going to infringe on the rights of the parent to know what is happening with their wards, their children, you have to tell me why, and why under the guise of a Computer Science pre-test.”
The BEA president said what made the situation more egregious was the fact that the Government usually alerted adults when they were carrying out surveys.
He said it was therefore alarming that the same courtesy was not extended to the parents of the students who did the test.
“When the Government is doing all of these surveys, doesn’t the Government go on GIS [the Government Information Service] and make public proclamations that this particular department is going to be doing a survey on x,y, and z and we ask you to be supportive and give them your attention? And this is Government talking to adults. More so with children, why do you think you can unilaterally take a decision and say you want to test them under the guise of some pretest,” Dr Taylor said.
He said even though apologies from the IDB and the Ministry of Education had been tendered, some questions still needed to be answered.
Dr Taylor said the Ministry of Education would now have a difficult time regaining the trust of parents.
“All the apologies you make, the parents are still going to be guarded, there is still going to be a degree of judgement because they really want clearly to understand that when their children are turned over to the schools to act as parents . . . that there is a degree of justification which says ‘you are looking after the needs of my child’,” he pointed out.
“Parents are still going to be asking themselves the question, how much or how far will I trust the care of my children to schools, inter alia the Ministry, when they seemingly dropped a critical ball at this stage.” (RB)
