Recently Prime Minister Andrew Holness broke ground at Bernard Lodge, St Catherine, to build what is proposed to be the first of six STEAM (science, technology, education, arts, mathematics) academies in the island. According to the prime minister, the costs to build these six schools will be in excess of $US 133 million.

APARTHEID EDUCATION

The proposal and move to build STEAM schools is a very clear indication to me that the Government seems keener to engage in legacy projects rather than work to fix the pitfalls of our education system, some of which have been identified.

We have an apartheid education system that has not served us well as a country. In many respects, success or failure is oftentimes determined at a very early stage by the school which one attends. This proposal to build these six so-called elite STEAM schools will do little to break the back of this apartheid education system. In fact, I will even go as far as to submit that it will further perpetuate and entrench same.

Every student that enters the walls of our educational institutions should be exposed to STEAM education this, however, cannot happen, given the less-than-meagre resources that are at the disposal of the vast majority of schools, particularly upgraded and rural schools. That $US133 million would have been better spent to overhaul our education system, in keeping with a number of proposals from the Orlando Patterson report. Many schools have labs that are in need of significant upgrading and refurbishing, not to mention the poor technological infrastructure that is available to teachers and students. Why are we not concentrating on addressing these issues so that all schools are given the opportunity to STEAM ahead, thereby facilitating an inclusive education system?

TECHNICAL SCHOOLS

The National Council on Education’s website lists 17 technical high schools that are scattered across the country. For a long time these technical schools have been engaged in STEAM education at different and varying levels. In fact, these schools emerged out of the STEAM education concept. Contrary to the popular view, the opposite of bright is really not technical. I, therefore, ask the question: Why are we seeking to reinvent the wheel by building these so-called STEAM institutions? It would take way less than $US133 million to significantly upgrade these technical schools, build out their laboratories, bring them up to world-class standards, and retrain teachers.

PRIMARY SCHOOLS

The way the Government is going about implementing STEAM education seems to me to be as illogical as building a house without a foundation. How is it that we are thinking of engaging in STEAM education on the back end by implementation at the secondary level? Why are we not building the foundation at the early childhood and primary levels? We clearly need to be far more strategic with this. We should be investing portions of this $U133 million in revamping early childhood and primary school curricula to better reflect STEAM skills; providing the physical infrastructure for this purpose; retraining our teachers, particularly at this level, in the first instance, to teach STEAM skills; and investing in our teacher training institutions to provide them with the resources and facilities to develop the requisite expertise in our educators to facilitate STEAM learning.

PATTERSON REPORT

The Orlando Patterson report was supposed to provide us with a road map to produce an inclusive, world-class education system. The only major announcement that has come out of the Office of Prime Minister and the Ministry of Education since the publishing of the report was the formation of an oversight committee. Since then, the national debate on the report and attempts to implement the recommendations from the the report have been minimal, if any at all. Is a strategic course of action being developed? What is the cost to be incurred? Over what time frame will this strategic course of action be conducted and what are the success indicators? This is the type of discourse we should be having so that the entire nation has a clear picture as to what will be happening.

That $US133 million would have been better spent greasing the wheels of transformation in the education system instead of building STEAM schools.

Better yet, there are a number of schools that are still on a shift system. Despite a number of announcements to end this practice, there has been minimal movement on this front in the last eight years. We can find funds to build STEAM schools, but we cannot find the funds to take these schools off shifts?

HEART/NSTA TRUST AND UTECH

The Government seems to lack a clear course of action as to how to go about transforming the educational landscape of Jamaica. HEART/NSTA Trust, for example, which was conceptualised by former Prime Minister Edward Seaga, has been languishing under the Office of the Prime Minister with no articulated strategic direction.

The entity is not short of financial resources and can certainly do a lot more to meet its mandate. It is first and foremost an educational institution and, therefore, should be transferred to the Ministry of Education and transformed into a national polytechnic university. It already has the resources to drive the transformation. Such a move would be most impactful in transforming the lives of the many young people who enter its doors and would otherwise not have had the opportunity to obtain a tertiary education. This is against the background that countries with a high crime rate have been shown to have a low percentage of its population accessing tertiary education.

Prime Minister Holness has often articulated that he wants Jamaica to become the Silicon Valley of the Caribbean. But he has certainly not articulated how to achieve this. Nevertheless, before there can be a Silicon Valley there must first be a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that will create a labour force to populate the industry.

The University of Technology, Jamaica, which, over the years, has operated more like a traditional university, should be made to become the MIT of the Caribbean to drive the creation of a technological industry.

Investments will always go where there is an available and efficient labour force. We, therefore, need to first create this labour force if we are going to create a Silicon Valley-type industry.

The transformation of our apartheid education system is impatient of debate. The prime minister and the Ministry of Education needs to stop the practice of breaking ground and develop a practice of breaking glass ceilings that are inhibiting the transformation of the education system. And they certainly need to be far more strategic and inclusive in the decision-making processes as it relates to the current trajectory of the education system.

Mark Malabver is principal of Yallahs High School and a PhD candidate. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer and markmalabver@yahoo.com.