I went to my school (handbag safely tucked under my arm, car parked right under the security guard’s nose, windows rolled down lest they try to break in again) to listen to a pep talk given by a noted economist, GSAT tutor and Ministry of Education (MOE) consultant to Grade Five and Grade Six parents about the GSAT exam.

While the Grade Six parents behind me whispered that the talk — much of it devoted to the importance of loving and encouraging your child — was a little late, the consultant hit all the right notes for any parent who has gone through the rigorous GSAT preparation process.

We have deprived them of their childhood because of GSAT, he said, and we are damaging them psychologically. How many times have you abused your child because of your ego which demands that your child gets 100 on everything? he asked. You are killing your children, he told us.

Education today is not about learning, it is about swatting, he noted correctly, while adding that the essence of our development is education and we’ll never get the IMF off our backs unless we get the education system right… yadda, yadda, yadda.

Certainly, my ears pricked up when he rightly said that we Jamaicans sussu-sussu but don’t talk up when it counts. We will protest gas hikes, but we won’t demonstrate for education. Instead of putting undue pressure on the children, and blaming the schools and attacking the teachers – who are the victims of the MOE’s curricula – we need to dump cow manure on the steps of the MOE. He’s absolutely right.

And so with that said, I am able to trot out my column from last year – with a little tweaking – regarding that onerous rite of passage for our 10-12 year-olds that is the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT). Those two days in March where the island’s Grade Six children have one single chance to achieve near-perfect scores in five subject areas – Mathematics, Science, English, Social Studies and Communication Tasks – on material they have been exposed to over a two-and-a-half-year period to earn a place at one of the five ‘top’ schools in Kingston or their equivalent in rural Jamaica. What a stress!

The parental anxiety that has become part and parcel of this annual ritual is expressed in anecdotes of children staying up late into the night studying or roused in the wee hours of the morning to practise using past papers; the curtailing of after-school activities and the school days being extended by hours upon hours of extra lessons, specialised classes, private tutoring and special ed counselling to ensure that all of the elements of the curriculum are covered. The GSAT has created a booming extra lessons industry.

The horror of the GSAT is revealed in the stories of doctors treating our children for GSAT stress and of them being beaten, their fragile egos being broken and then being branded as failures for not getting into the school of their choice. The GSAT is also responsible for the annual creation of a new set of neurotic parents.

The failure of the GSAT is exposed by the fact that it focuses predominantly on forcing our children to ‘swot’ every line and letter, every fact and figure, every bit of seemingly innocuous information contained in prescribed texts, often without their real understanding of its meaning or significance

How meaningful is it, I wonder, for a 10-year-old to know how to fill out an immigration or employment form, type a résumé, write a receipt or complete a remittance form? In the real world would it be acceptable, legal even, were they to do so? One concerned parent has joked that the Child Care and Protection Act might be violated by the severe GSAT preparation methods. It might not be a joke after all.

While heartened by the fact that the exam is currently under review by the Ministry of Education, there is a huge disconnect between the ministry’s “Competence-Based Transition Policy” that is the GSAT and the reading, writing and ‘rithmetic ability of the children actually taking this exam.

If there is concern that the 10-year-old GSAT student is “not adequately meeting the demands of the nation’s changing education sector” (according to a preliminary study by the ministry), that concern is hardly addressed by implementing a new series of GSAT-like exams for our Grade Four students (as was to occur in June 2009) or by screening our Grade One students (as is planned) for their literacy and numeracy readiness. The predictable result of all this GSAT pre-screening is that the ‘extras’ and the anxiety will start even earlier for our children, and their childhood would consist only of those years between birth and upper kindergarten.

I’ve gleaned questions from the 2009 paper and while I am delighted that I can talk ‘high finance’ with my 10-year-old – for example, I can ask, “In which year did THJ bank experience a decline in earnings?” – there was too that question which has changed my whole notion of what the green in the Jamaican flag represents. According to the 2009 GSAT paper, it is “hope and prosperity” and not the lush vegetation of the country as I have long believed. That’s a trick question if you ask me.

What is of great concern is the extraordinary mastery of the information required by an 11-year-old to answer the varying easy, tricky, difficult and unanswerable questions in the subject areas. That our children should be able to identify the first line of Trinidad’s national anthem assumes that they can identify the first line of the national anthems of all our other Caribbean neighbours. A sampling of the culture is one thing, knowing the specifics of all the anthems is a bit much. That prep and primary schoolers must be able to manipulate geometrical, algebraic and statistical equations raises the question: What do these children do in high school?

In the years leading up to GSAT 2009, I met parents who sought to avoid the exam, obsessed over it relentlessly and complained bitterly about it. I am yet to meet a parent who has embraced it. What I do know for sure is that once those two days in March have passed, we hold our collective breath for two months until the results are out, and then we move on to secondary and high school.

It’s up to the rest of us, those who have other little children in the system, and those who seek to mould the minds of children coming into the system, to be vocal about what’s wrong with the GSAT and make representation to change it.

Let me know if you need some manure.

scowicomm@gmail.com