AS the New Year gets underway, the field of education is very much in the news at the global and national levels. Not only is it back-to-school time after the Christmas holidays, but at the global level we are seeing the Republicans in the Congress of the United States returning to Washington with a renewal of their mean-spirited approach to matters of social justice and social welfare, by proposing serious cuts in the education budget of the nation and the repeal of the Health Care Reform legislation of the Obama Administration. Meanwhile, here in Jamaica, the fallout from the poor performance of students in the Grade 4 literacy and numeracy tests continues to reverberate.

An editorial carried recently in The Gleaner lauded the president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, Miss Nadine Molloy, for her New Year message in which she stated that teachers need to take responsibility for educational outcomes in a more intentional manner than they have done in the past, and that the JTA “cannot and will not” absolve itself of responsibility for our children’s performance in the classroom.

Her statement is being gratuitously interpreted as a sign of a new and maturing president who is now indicating a readiness to embrace the call for greater performance and accountability among teachers in this country.

While I support the spirit of the comments attributed to Miss Molloy, I am in no position to comment on whether these are indicative of any kind of transformation on her part. No one can take comfort in the level of performance which has surfaced in the Grade 4 tests and in the number of students who graduate from secondary school as illiterates or with a dismal performance in the CSEC Examinations.

I believe, however, that we need to have a greater appreciation of where we are today, how we reached this point, and what are some of the major challenges facing education at this time.

Education has never been at an acceptable level in this country. In decades not long past there was no such thing as universal primary education as the provisions did not exist. Regular attendance at school was often hampered because of poverty or parents who did not see the value of education. The options for an educated population were limited and there were barriers to the few opportunities for social mobility.

The prospect of secondary education was closed to all but a few of each eligible cohort. The advent of the Common Entrance Examination as an initiative under the Norman Manley Government, and new secondary schools under the watch of the late Hon Edwin Allen meant significant changes in the educational landscape. When in the 1960s Allen announced his intention to create these schools he was the target of much ridicule by persons of all political persuasions who said that he was mad and unrealistic, as Jamaica could not afford to have all of these secondary schools.

They cited among other things the fact that we did not have the principals and teachers to staff the institutions, and questioned where the students would come from. Behind this latter observation was the old cultural prejudice that only bright students should have secondary education and these were represented by the 2,500 children who constituted the cohort that received Common Entrance passes to the traditional high schools which existed at the time. Secondary education was not for the masses of Jamaicans and their children.

Many initiatives had to be taken at the time to provide the human resources to staff these institutions. The Government of the day introduced a model of teacher training known as the 2+1, which involved two years of intramural studies and one year of internship. While there were always persons who were qualified and saw teaching as their vocation, of necessity the standard for admission to teachers’ college, and hence to the teaching profession, had to be lowered in order to meet the intake requirements.

In the succeeding years there were government-funded programmes for students to come to college with less than the desired matriculation levels and to pursue additional GCE subjects while pursuing an intramural course of teacher training. Many persons who would not have otherwise had an opportunity for tertiary education took advantage of the situation, thereby making the teachers’ college the “Poor Man’s University”. As a consequence, many of these persons did not stay in teaching. Perhaps scientific research may show that the greatest exodus of graduates of teachers’ colleges from the profession took place in that era.

As one who was involved in teacher education at the time, I recall conversations in which colleagues and I would be involved as to whether we would want some of the students who were barely scraping through their subjects to teach our children, and were clear that this was an undesirable situation, although the standards for accreditation allowed them the right to qualify as teachers.

There was also an initiative known as the In-service Teacher Education Training which made provision for the upgrading of persons who had been in the teaching profession for many years as pre-trained teachers but who had never sought or had the opportunity to go to teachers’ college while they continued their work in the classroom. This fast-track approach could never produce adequately trained teachers. We fool ourselves as a nation if we do not recognise that a generation of teachers have come out of this context of teacher training.

The good news is that many of these teachers used the opportunity to matriculate and went on to the University of the West Indies to pursue undergraduate studies. In the early days, the university was not very accommodating of these applicants. Alongside this problem of academic standards of persons entering the teaching profession, there developed a further systemic approach to the provision of education for our children which would clearly short-change the students in terms of the quality of education which they could receive. I speak of the introduction of the shift system.

During the past week, as I watched some students going home at 12:30 pm from school, I wondered how much we can expect such a system to deliver when the students should just about reach the middle of a school day of learning. If one adds to that the large class sizes, then we must ask ourselves why are we surprised at the low standard of the Grade 4 results and the poor performance of some of the children at the secondary level.

It seems at times that in our discussion of the state of education today we are suggesting that our teachers have been given adequate preparation and education for the task and have been negligent and wilful in their approach to the task. I have no doubt that, as in every sphere of employment, there are persons who are lazy and are not exerting themselves, while there are many others who are delivering out of the storehouses of their knowledge and competence, as limited as that may be.

The remedy to this situation will of course require further equipping of teachers for the dynamic field of pedagogy, the inculcation of a greater sense of accountability and performance through the adoption of mutually agreed instruments of assessment, and the weeding out of those who are not willing to perform or unable to perform at the required levels.

Inevitably every discussion of education comes around to a focus on the stakeholders. The Ministry of Education will need to be the subject of constant scrutiny in this regard as the infrastructural and human resources which it provides for the advancement of the education system will make a difference to the outcomes, even with the best effort on the part of the teachers.

One of the issues which we must also hold up before the Ministry of Education and the way it attributes responsibility and blame is the fact that education is a dynamic field in which there is no consensus as to what should be covered in schools today and, as a consequence, school systems the world over have to reckon with the gap between what they are offering and what is considered the desired or ideal offering.

When it comes to the matter of numeracy, for example, there are teachers who believe that we should still be doing things the old way, with children learning their times tables by rote and recitation. There are others who believe that these are outmoded approaches which should not be resuscitated.

By way of anecdotal experience I have been informed by some women who assist children from an inner-city community with after-school work that they encounter students at the primary level who have ability but are limited because they do not know their times tables and the basic principles of addition, subtraction and multiplication. Is this part of the reason for the dismal performance in the Grade 4 tests?

During the recent Christmas vacation I had the opportunity to sit with a serving high school principal and to speak about what is going on in school today. It is disheartening to learn of the activities of parents and students as major stakeholders in the process of education. The environment for learning is one which is fraught with violence and in which teachers are now afraid of students and parents who come with violence to take on any member of the school community.

I learnt that two students of the school have been taken into police custody for the possession of firearms. Parents are said to be in collusion with children in antisocial behaviour and in offering excuses for a lack of interest in school. Parents are unabashed in reporting to the principal that the children are not taking their books home and back to school because the books are too heavy. I could not help thinking of the thrashing I would have received from my mother if I had even tried to offer such an excuse to her.

The culture of materialism and money-grabbing schemes is taking centrestage in the life of many of our children and their parents. Consider the case of a Grade 8 student who owns his own multiple-bedroom house from his earnings from these sources, or the school-age child and her mother under arrest for prostitution in a hot spot at night.

Perhaps the irony in all of this is the fact that schooling as we know it today began as part of the industrial revolution and was a way of equipping persons for work in the modern society, and which would provide a way of living beyond the family farm or peasant existence, but today many see the pursuit of education as a hindrance and distraction from the business of earning money and earning it the quick way.

Perhaps this may be as good a time as any for us as a society to redefine for ourselves what education is about, what we are expecting as the outcomes, and what is the role of the various stakeholders in the achievement of the same. It seems that for now we need to find new and creative ways to inject motivation, enthusiasm, accountability and commitment among the various stakeholders, as the shortcuts and options to earning a living and taking one’s place in society seem to be more attractive to many of today’s students and parents than the long and arduous road to education.

Howard Gregory is the Suffragan Bishop of Montego Bay