FOR the past century and more those societies that have managed to improve the majority of their population have done it through massive state intervention in education. Perhaps nowhere was this better illustrated than in the history of Britain, from which Jamaica has benefited significantly. Their formal education started with voluntary religious organisations and for a very long time literacy was restricted to clergymen. Church and state began to work together especially after the prolonged international religious wars initiated by the fragmentation of the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century. Formal education, therefore, became a matter of state concern.

By the middle of the 19th century two systems of education were commonplace. The larger system by far was the religiously dominated voluntary schools that provided an education for an increasingly wider community than clergy and their offspring. States operated a much smaller system designed to socialise youth through various parliamentary acts such as the Poor Laws, the Factory Acts, and the Reformatory and Industrial School Acts. Public education via these various acts served more as a form of social control than a mechanism for developing character and civility.

Fundamental changes in English society after the Napoleonic Wars inspired a series of inconclusive public debates about education for several decades until 1870. In that year Parliament passed a monumental Elementary Education Act that created secular school boards for any district in England and Wales where deficient primary education for children of the working classes existed. The industrial revolution had, among other things, emphasised the necessity of a literate work force. The British Government reluctantly recognised this and set up a system that revolutionised the basis for education in Britain and the colonies. The system was severely weakened in the 1890s but the awareness of education as a major tool for societal reconstruction remained emphatically strong.

Many other societies also acted on the knowledge of the importance of a general education in forging their societies. A parallel attention to general public education took place in the United States after the 1840s, spurred on by the Yale-educated botanist, classical scholar, missionary and political activist, Jonathan Baldwin Turner from Illinois. By 1862 Turner’s ideas found fulfilment in the passage of the Morrill Act that established a number of land grant colleges across the nation beginning with Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, Kansas, New Jersey, and West Virginia. Eventually every state became eligible for 30,000 acres of federal land per representative in Congress. The District of Columbia received cash in lieu of land when its system was established in 1967 and similar cash concessions were made in 1972 to American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Marianas and the US Virgin Islands.

After the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the Fidel Castro government declared 1961 to be a “Year of Education” in which they mounted a massive programme that virtually eliminated adult illiteracy across the island. The Cuban method is still being employed in several Pacific islands today.

Since the Second World War many countries such as Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Spain, Chile, and Brazil have engaged in rapid modernisation by placing a strong emphasis on education at all levels. Education not only serves to telescope the differences between themselves and more developed and modernised countries but also to lay the foundation for a self-sustaining, technically competent and nationally oriented population. Education forms an elevator for economic and social mobility.

Education has two interrelated purposes. The first is to develop technical competencies needed for any individual to improve his or her condition largely through individual efforts. This process is achieved through a combination of formal instruction accompanied by self-directed improvement deriving from one’s innate abilities. The second purpose of an organised system of education is to inculcate desirable traits of civility and citizenship that constitute the hallmarks of any good society. No educational system can afford to fail in either of these two purposes.

Yet it seems that the present system of education in Jamaica fails to meet the required efficacy when measured by these two purposes. Many schools appear to fall short of developing basic technical skills in literacy, logical thinking and competent elementary calculations among a broad spectrum of students. Some schools fail to graduate scholars who are civil, altruistic, and sensitive to the essential needs of their communities.

Nevertheless it is far too soon to describe either the educational system as a failure or Jamaica as a failed state. There is much that works well at present in the educational system; and Jamaica, though severely challenged, has not yet categorically failed. Anyone spending a day at Wolmer’s, Clarendon College or Manchester High School cannot resist optimism about the quality of some Jamaican high schools and their teachers. But any educational programme must be considered a work in progress, therefore requiring constant attention and possible modification.

The most urgent educational need in Jamaica today is to have a coordinated mission, as well as a clearly articulated mission statement with broad-based public support. Two preliminary questions to any such mission statement should deal with the structure of the system of education and its principal national purpose.

Somehow the four levels of education – pre-school, primary, secondary and university – need to be integrated more efficaciously in order to assure every Jamaican child the best possible opportunity for continuous intellectual growth and hands-on community engagement. From age three or four each child should not only be exposed to certain age-appropriate skills but also to a milieu of proper socialisation where the individual becomes increasingly aware of being a responsible part of a wider community. In pre-school the focus could be on tolerance. In primary school the emphasis could be placed on service. In high school students should begin to demonstrate leadership, responsibility and accountability. Students in college or university begin to hone their individual skills to the service of the individual, the community, the nation and the wider world. That is the sort of system that works.