Dear Editor,

Small, poor, resource-scare countries find themselves in a quandary. Public education is swiftly undergoing a revolution of frightening possibilities. Public education, at least to the sixth grade, has been seen as a basic human right in many countries. Poor countries can hardly afford to pay teachers for the conventional ways of teaching in ever larger classrooms equipped with writing desks and chalk blackboards.Yet modernisation makes new, ever expensive demands. For example, the old standard libraries of books and journals are being replaced by electronic access to information data bases. When in March the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica announced the end of its paper editions it was like a deathknell for book-based libraries. From now on looking anything up in new editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica will require access to the internet. And that change represents an expensive revolution in teaching and research.

Imagine now the financial implications of modernising a rural public school. The school must have reliably consistent electricity to run the electronic machines.Those machines must be constantly serviced to perform when required. The machines or their programmes must be frequently updated or replaced. And those are just the built-in recurrent costs. Among poor countries these predictable costs cannot be sustained indefinitely.

Nevertheless, to compete in the modern world there is no turning back. The modernisation treadmill does not allow that. So what options exist for those countries that cannot afford the cost of educational modernisation? How do they compete in the modern world?

Part of the answers to these questions might be in re-thinking the delivery systems of education. Maybe, just maybe, attending educational establishments might not be necessary for everyone. Schools with up-to-date internet access can begin to contemplate long-distance teaching, with both teachers and pupils staying in the comfort of the homes and interactively teaching and learning together. That eliminates the school building and the library, as well as all the gadgets and programmes involved. Of course, that shifts the cost of teaching away from the state and on to the parents. But that has been the direction in which education has been moving for some time anyhow.

Lucas Daniel

Montego Bay

St James