Independent Senator Dr Kristina Hinds is calling for an urgent revamping of the island’s education system to address worryingly low literacy levels among students.
Senator Hinds said that though much has been promised on educational reform over the years, no concrete plans have yet been seen, despite the uncomfortably high numbers of students not being able to read.
Speaking in the Upper House during Tuesday’s debate on the Appropriation Bill 2023, the university lecturer said: “It’s taking too long to change our educational system. I am not talking about fancy things here. I am talking about the fact that there are too many children in Barbados that cannot read. This 99 per cent literacy rate we boast of, I don’t know when that statistic was established. When I was a child I heard about it and still hear about it now.”
She added: “I can tell you, the UWI has a reading programme, and there are children in Barbados who cannot read, who are being pushed through the educational system. They can write their name on the exam paper, but they cannot really read. They are not functionally literate. We cannot get this advanced economy that we are looking for, if people cannot read.”
Dr Hinds who is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science and Head of the Department of Government, Sociology, Social Work and Psychology at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill Campus, insisted that if the government was fully intent on investing heavily in STEM (Science, Technology Engineering Mathematics) subjects greater attention should be paid to the foundation subjects.
“At UWI too many people come to the university having to do remedial Mathematics. We have problems with maths, we have problems with the basics that I hope that we all are going to work to the address. This significant investment in education must be addressing these issues. We can deal with robotics, we can deal with all of these fancy things but we have to get to the basics.
“We cannot serve a new economy or a new society with these deficiencies… imagine if we were capturing all of these children who cannot read and all of the people who do not have proper mathematical skills…the potentials we could see in science.”
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