CORAL SPRING, Trelawny — Former president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) Errol Miller has highlighted the paradox of the negative characterisation of the local education system and the glorification of its offshoot, the world-class Boys’ and Girls’ Athletics Championships (Champs).

“They are products and by-products. Champs is a by-product of secondary education, it’s a sport spin-off,” he argued.

Champs is widely viewed as the world’s biggest track and field event involving high school students.

“Now who run Champs? The principals of 161 secondary schools in Jamaica. Who run at Champs? The students of all these high schools. And it is now acclaimed to be the best organised and the best run schoolboy athletics event in the world with high performances from the students,” Miller added.

He contended that the disparity between the product and its derivative is unnatural.

“How could the principals and the teachers and the students of high schools across Jamaica perform world leading, sustained for a number of years and then the product is so poor? Such difference between product and by-product is not usually found in nature. You can’t have excellence of the by-product and nothing with the product. It tells you that the explanation does not lie in performance,” he said.

Miller was speaking last Wednesday at the second day of the JTA’s annual education conference at the Ocean Coral Spring Hotel in Trelawny.

He inferred that the reason behind the thinking could be the notion held in some circles that African descendants are renowned for their physical prowess but not their brainpower.

“And we better be careful when we just put it as athletics and sports because you see it ties into another little thing that we could miss. Our kind of people, we who are non-white, are supposed to be good with body. We can run fast, jump fast, run and we can do sports but then we’re not good with intellect,” Miller said.

He also noted the contrast between 19th-century educators who were lionised versus the vilification of their current counterparts.

“Boys’ and Girls’ Champs just finished and I want to relate it to a long pattern in Jamaica. Go back to the 1850s. If you look at that pattern, it’s simply this: teachers of the past generations who have retired, have always been great teachers and icons. They are elders and the great people of the profession and they are praised universally,” he said.

“But you see those who are presently in the system, they are denigrated and disregarded. They are not good. All the good teachers have left; is only us riff-raff that are left here. It’s [the] ones who couldn’t find jobs in other places,” he added in explaining the sentiments sometimes expressed.

He noted that from the outset it was the JTA, in the late 1980s, “that approached the minister of education, suggested that instead of having new secondary schools over here and high schools over here, let us integrate them into one system for the country”.

“And it was envisaged from then that sports would be the first area in which this would show,” Miller told the gathering of educators.

“It would be remiss of me to be speaking to you tonight and not remember that it was Minister of Education the Honourable Dr Neville Gallimore, who adopted that policy first, followed by Minister of Education the Honourable Carlyle Dunkley that followed and every succeeding minister of education since then,” he added.