Dear Editor,

The education system needs a good shake-up. Shake it up and shake it out thoroughly like a dusty rug. Stop trying to put new wine into old bottles. Revamp the system completely. Could we stop overburdening our young ones with so much homework? Instead, can we please teach them to think? Capture their imagination. I’m sure they’ll cease to be unfocused.

We are crying out for entrepreneurs. They are right here under our noses. Teach them to connect dots that nobody else is connecting. Throw some foreign languages at them in a fun setting: songs, dances, poems, numbers in Spanish, French, Chinese, Portuguese and Japanese. They are like little sponges. They’ll soak them up in no time.

I told a 14-year-old last week that when Cubans pray they pray in Spanish and, of course, God hears and understands. It tickled his funny bone no end. I am concerned that we are stuck in a monolingual English-speaking pond. So when we think of going overseas we limit ourselves to the US, Canada and the UK. And all three countries have tried in various ways to show us that we’re not really welcome within their borders. Yet the rest of the world is there. There are billions of people speaking French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and countless other languages. There are many foreigners living among us speaking their various languages. Why are we limiting ourselves? What are we afraid of?

When you reach a certain level you are expected to be competent in a foreign language. The late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada was fluently bilingual in French and English. With my own ears, I heard President Fidel Castro converse with his friend, the late Prime Minister Michael Manley, in English. And P J Patterson is comfortable and competent in Spanish. When Colombians, Haitians, Chinese, etc, are accused of wrongdoing and have to appear in court, Jamaica is required to provide interpreters for them if they don’t understand English. Where are we to find these interpreters?

But…who are we? We are the irrepressible ones. Sit and talk long enough with any Ghanaian who knows his history and he will tell you that our Jamaican ancestors were the “troublemakers” who dared to think, who dared to challenge authority. When the slave purchasers came along they were glad to get rid of them and sold them off. Once the slaving ships arrived in the West, the “troublemakers” (ie the thinkers), I am told, were dropped off in Jamaica. The milder personalities were taken to the other islands. Our history does not begin with slavery. We were a great people with a proud tradition centuries before that. It’s time to rewrite our history syllabus completely. I’ve travelled to many countries and lived in quite a few and I have not met any nationality anywhere that is more intelligent than Jamaicans. None!

Parthe Edwards

Former interpreter to Prime Minister Michael Manley

partheingrid@hotmail.com