The people of this country seem to be stuck in a tradition of keeping quiet. My observation is that, in general, many do not like to go against authority; they like to follow, especially their political leaders. Like dead fish, they go with the flow.

Too many important issues and policies regarding the nation are uncontested. One such is education. In 2004 and 2021 there were two major commissions on education conducted in the name of transformation, but the finished products were labelled “reform”.

Other issues are the transplanting of this STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) curriculum and the most recent Transforming Education for National Development with the public relations tag line TREND. These issues are major policy initiatives, with very high costs, that have been pushed through without thorough questioning by the public, the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, the trade unions, and the teacher training institutions.

There is need for a national debate on the state of education in Jamaica. There is a thinking that some people are fearful of victimisation/job loss so they keep quiet. Another view contends that the Church-influenced structure and function of education trained people to obey and not to question leadership.

There are those who are quick to blame “broken homes” and “broken families” as factors associated with the poor performance in the educational system. The main feature of this educational crisis is grounded in the history of colonialism. While “flag independence” is an important signal of a new nation, the process of decolonisation is incomplete.

Let me be very clear, all we have had is an incomplete process of change. After more than 60 years of Independence, there has been limited decolonisation of politics; no decolonisation in culture and economics. The problem is that we are still in a neo-colonial mode made worse by globalisation and its attendants. For example, both the 2004 Dr Rae Davis-led “Task Force on Educational Reform” made the point in the early pages of the report that it was important to respond to the forces of globalisation. A careful observation of the Professor Orlando Patterson Commission’s report “The Reform of Education in Jamaica” shows that the research was grounded mainly in papers from international regimes, external forces.

Of course, there is a long list of consultations and links with educational institutions, but it is my observation that the mountain of research on the problems in the Jamaican educational system are more important that instructions from the European Union, the World Bank, and World Trade Organisation among others. Each commission promised transformation yet their final reports are labelled “Reform”. By definition, “reform” has to do with change in behaviour without changing structure and function, while “transformation” has to do with changing the structure and function.

In recent months we witnessed the saturation of the airwaves with promotion of TREND and its seven pillars for change. This is regrettably another waste of time. It is important to know about the source of funding for TREND and these STEM institutions. When I think about what we are doing with this STEM transplant, the novel The Mimic Men by V S Naipaul comes to mind.

This is why the issue of cultural decolonisation with emphasis on education is so important. We have grown to become so dependent on the outside world that we are not able to think for ourselves. I recall an important lesson from a story in the book The Adventures of the Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach. These creatures lived under the water and did so by holding on to the objects in the setting. One day one among them said, “I am going to break away,” and he was highly discouraged that he would never make it, but he did. Sailing along with the current in the water over a village similar to where the creature is coming from, those below looked up and shouted, “There goes the messiah,” and the one above looked down and said, “No, the messiah is in all of us if we dare to let go.”

We need to find our own solutions. This issue of education is a central feature in our underdevelopment as well as a major problem for this neoliberal democracy. Education is a critical feature for a successful democracy. This is why the people should organise themselves in communities, not just to make their parties win elections, but for change in important policy areas, such as education.

The major problems with our system of education are located in the structure and function. Firstly, any profound change in education must be responsive to its colonial philosophy, manifested in rote learning. Secondly, there are very clear signals that there is a major language crisis in education; that is, there is the dominance of students that are Patois- speaking and who will never learn because they are taught in the language of education, English, a language they do not understand.

There are many studies on the colonial intent in the emergence of the Jamaican educational system. Both the structure and function of education in Jamaica were designed for social control. Students are oriented to be obedient to status quo and more often than not they are not taught how to develop their own voices and opinions. They were taught to follow.

There are many manifestations of the language crisis in the educational system. For example, it is public knowledge that in some schools students are promoted to the next form to make way for incoming new students and some student who are leaving high schools are functionally illiterate. The low passes in examinations in English language, mathematics, and the sciences are as a result of students’ ignorance of the rules of English language and as such they lack logic and reasoning skills. Many articles and recommendations have been made for English to be taught, in the same ways French and Spanish lessons are conducted, as a second language. In the article ‘Intellectual ability’, Majid Amini, a lecturer at The University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, shares his observation of the problem of structure and function in our system of education. He argues that the students he encounters in his classroom are bright in terms of having matriculation requirements, but in their response to their school work, they are big on recalling. They are stuck at this lowest level of the cognitive scale; their skills of analysis, evaluation, and application (higher levels of the cognitive scale) are absent. He concludes that the rote system of learning has no thinking component; that is, critical and creative thinking. The absence of these indispensable qualities of education are responsible for the poor quality students we continue to produce year after year.

Philosophy in education guides practice and policies, curriculum, and teaching and learning approaches. Philosophy is about discovering and examining a major problem with a view to changing the situation. While much about philosophy is grounded in the Western intellectual system, there are some ideas we will find helpful as we search for our own solution.

Can we look at the progressive and the reconstructionist schools of thinking as ways of displacing the colonial model of education in Jamaica? We are wasting time and money on these new policies in education, and we must be mindful of policymakers who will be urged by the forces of globalisation to “marketise” and privatise education. Even National Hero Marcus Garvey in his Marcus Garvey People’s Progressive Party manifesto of 1929 offered an anti-colonial path to education.

Time for the decolonisation of education in Jamaica.

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