By Vivienne Green-Evans

Observer staff reporter

Educators don’t want to start cheering yet, but the signs are good: men are going back to school to learn to read and write.

The National Council for Education is reporting that demand for adult institutes – the preferred name because JAMAL class still bears a stigma – is growing rapidly and there are just not enough of them around.

And the motive is clear – they want to complete their primary or secondary school education and to become certified.

A Sunday Observer check of a representative sample of such institutions found that all were overcrowded and men consistently outnumbered the women.

“It’s a shocker,” said Rev Dr Aaron Dumas, commenting on the fact that men made up the majority of the 60 persons attending the First Baptist Church Adult Institute at Sandringham Avenue in St Andrew. “We have had to stop enrolling people in the institute, because we don’t have enough teachers to handle the demand.”

There are six volunteer teachers.

Dumas started the institute after one call to his nightly radio show on Power-106 FM turned into a flood of requests for information on how to access adult literacy classes. Now, the students are asking that he increase classes from one day to two days per week.

Similar reports of overcrowded classes, with men in the majority, came from the Tarrant Baptist Evening Institute where Marlene Williams, a teacher, said their intake had jumped from the usual 120 or so per year to 150 students this past semester. Men comprise at least 58 per cent of the enrolment, with their ages ranging from 17 to over 50.

“Each term, it (enrolment) keeps getting higher,” Williams told the newspaper.

The few schools that have opened up to give remedial help to adults were hardly enough to meet the demand, Independent Schools Registrar from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture, Freda Jones, revealed. “There is a high demand for spaces as a number of persons are now re-looking at the need to upgrade themselves,” Jones said.

She said these persons, who fear being branded illiterate by attending a JAMAL (Jamaican Movement for the Advancement of Literacy) centre, had been calling the ministry.

“Just yesterday somebody called from the Spanish Town area to know where he could go to upgrade his reading skills, and we don’t have a lot of those (adult remedial) institutions.”

Thirty-something Paul Campbell, one of the men who make up 85 per cent of the 165 persons enrolled at the Hydel Evening Institute, off the Mandela Highway linking St Catherine and St Andrew, travels once or twice weekly from Westmoreland to attend remedial classes in reading.

Campbell, who owns a bus, left school at around age 14 when he was in Grade nine. For years he suffered the regret of having to leave school prematurely and relived his regrets each time a job application was denied.

“Is not that I wasn’t interested (in school),” he told the Sunday Observer during an interview. “It’s a family thing. I didn’t get the full-time support.”

Now he has hope that one day he will acquire a university education.

Nugent Clarke, also a student at Hydel and who travels from nearby Spanish Town, is over 70 years old. He decided to take on basic English, basic Mathematics and remedial reading, despite operating a successful business selling cooking gas and household chemicals.

“I came to upgrade myself so that I can fit in at any angle,” he said. “I’m not going to quit until I feel satisfied and I can ease back.”

Two of the men at Hydel who are completing basic education are married to university graduates but were not willing to do an interview. They attend faithfully, according to Hyacinth Bennett, director of the Hydel group of schools, which includes a nursery, pre-school, preparatory and high schools, and special education programme.

There is also a man and wife couple – Ronald and Delores Roxburgh from Spanish Town. Ronald, 53, is a photographer. He was coaxed by his wife to attend pre-CXC classes with her. “Is quite a while I haven’t been to school,” he told the Sunday Observer. “I think I’m catching on. I want to go as far as I can go.”

Among the men turning up for remedial classes are a minister of religion, carpenters, masons and the like. Most are either primary or high school drop-outs but want this opportunity to move ahead. There is even an inspector of police who is doing computer classes in preparation for CXC exams.

Enrolment has been brisk at Hydel, with 16 per cent of the intake registering in the last six weeks alone. The institute was opened in January this year.

Bennett said the institute aimed to provide adults with an opportunity to acquire the equivalent of a high school diploma, as well as CXC qualifications and beyond.

The school offers a progression of courses that can take a student from basic reading and basic Mathematics to the Caribbean Certificate of Examination’s (CXC’s) Ordinary level certification within a few years, depending on the student’s pace and the level at which they enter the programme.

Bennett noted that 90 per cent of the men there required remedial reading. “As a matter of fact, we have had to start the majority of them from scratch, which includes letter recognition and letter sounds,” she said. “More importantly, we have had to work on their self-confidence.”

Finance Minister Dr Omar Davies, who has had to grapple with runaway illiteracy in his South St Andrew constituency, last month launched an Adult Continuing Education (ACE) Programme targeting adults aged 15 and over. Like Hydel, it offers three levels of training, from basic to CXCs, in addition to career counselling. ACE co-ordinator, Joan Spencer, immediately faced the space problem, as 342 persons came vying for 100 spaces.

“Some of them failed in high school and are trying to catch a one subject here or there,” said Spencer. “When we started to register, we realised that there was a rush on the programme. We closed the deadline and people complained, and we opened it back and there was still a rush.”

When she told Davies that they had a problem, his response was: “I would rather solve this problem, than deal with that other problem of continued ignorance (illiteracy).”

Last Wednesday, Ralph Thompson, a member of the National Council on Education (NCE), speaking at a Kingston Bookshop function, estimated that “remedial education is a multi-million dollar industry”.

NCE executive director, Ruth Morris, agreed: “It is a part of lifelong learning. It is a part of the new dispensation …(and) it’s just getting to us.”

She noted that with the economy expanding globally, many persons were now realising that additional certification was the main door towards acquiring a new job, a promotion or a change of career. Even for those at the very low end of the spectrum, she surmised, “there has to be a greater pull factor than the desire to read”.

The resurgence of male interest in getting an education should come as good news to educators and social planners who have often bemoaned the high drop-out rate among boys in the primary system.

According to data from the state-run Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), boys drop out of school more, and earlier, than girls, and most don’t re-enter the system. In their 2002 report, the PIOJ noted that up to grade five, the repetition and drop-out rate was almost twice as high for boys as for girls and about equal at grades six and seven.

At high school, the drop-out rate, on average, is about twice as high for boys until grades 10 and 11 when the situation reverses and the drop-out rate for girls in those grades becomes twice as high, frequently as a result of teenage pregnancy.

When the Michael Manley Government started JAMAL in 1974, it was estimated that between 40 and 50 per cent of the adult population were illiterate. JAMAL’s mission then was “to eradicate illiteracy in the shortest possible time and to maintain functional literacy through continuing adult education and human resource development”.

Ten years later, a national literacy survey commissioned by JAMAL showed that the adult illiteracy rate had fallen to 24.2 per cent. But the survey showed that the illiteracy rate was higher in males (30.8 per cent) than females (18.8 per cent). Later data suggest that the illiteracy rate has improved and is now in the region of 14 per cent for women and 26 per cent for men.

“There is a larger percentage of men than women in basic literacy classes in the JAMAL and other programmes we are associated with,” said Seymour Riley, executive director of JAMAL. “It’s been the pattern for some time now. It’s really a reflection that the illiteracy rate among men is higher, so the classes generally tend to have more men than women.”

Through JAMAL, the Government is now piloting the High School Equivalency Programme (HSEP), specifically targeting high school drop-outs who include some who never learned to read and write. The HSEP pilot is being introduced in workplaces in Montego Bay and Ocho Rios, in community groups in Discovery Bay and in JAMAL centres in Kingston, Portland and Manchester. It is being administered and implemented by JAMAL.

HSEP spokesperson, Elaine Ferguson, said the pilot had generated much interest among persons wanting to participate, despite their best efforts to keep the pilot programme low-keyed.

“We just wanted to have kept this relatively low-keyed, do the pilot, get things right, before we started the promotions and the publicity. But the response has been really, really unbelievable. People are saying, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you . we need this opportunity’,” Ferguson disclosed.

Riley added that applications from adults wanting to be on the pilot HSEP showed a high level of interest. But when a readiness inventory test of all the applicants was done, only one-third were found to be at the level to begin. The other two-thirds needed to improve their basic education.

Gloria Salmon, an executive member of the Jamaican Council for Adult Education which promotes awareness of the need for continuing adult education, said the trend of older men going back to literacy classes was worldwide. “They recognise that they are at a disadvantage by not being educated, in that they cannot get jobs,” she explained.

Salmon, who is the immediate past executive director of the Jamaica Library Service, bemoaned the stigma attached to JAMAL classes, which prevents many adults, who could benefit, from going. But she said that the High School Equivalency Programme represented a changing face for JAMAL.

“JAMAL is looking at changing its face and sort of making it (adult basic education) more interesting and more marketable to get more people to come,” said Salmon.