AS has been the case for all those who have ever taken on the portfolio, newly minted Education Minister Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon is facing numerous, unenviable challenges.

How much time she will actually have to resolve those challenges will be probably determined by the electorate when Jamaicans go to the polls in a few months.

We believe her head is in the right place, based on a comment she made while lamenting functional illiteracy in many high schools during a tour of Manchester last week.

“We have too many children leaving primary school [having done the high school entrance exam Primary Exit Profile (PEP)] who are not literate…” said Senator Morris Dixon.

“What is the point of having a heavy curriculum and heavy material to go through [in high school] and you are not literate? At a minimum every child should leave primary school literate — that is our goal,” she added.

For Jamaicans contemplating the upcoming parliamentary election, a comforting thought should be that both political parties have emphasised the absolute imperative of children being literate on entering high school.

At last September’s national conference of the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) for example, members of that party’s leadership repeatedly declared that education and literacy would be central to policy should they be elected.

Last week, Senator Morris Dixon — who says she is consulting widely with stakeholders and school leaders in Manchester — pointed to the obvious need for specialist attention to reading.

If we understand her correctly, the education minister wants reading as a single subject area in the primary school curriculum.

It may seem strange that, down the decades, successive governments have failed to come to grips with the clear need to ensure that as close to 100 per cent of children as is infinitely possible are functionally literate before high school.

The short answer is an inequitable approach to education in Jamaica.

That’s vividly captured by the Professor Orlando Patterson-led report on Jamaica’s education system which found that poverty results in far too many young people entering the labour market unskilled, barely literate, and illiterate.

That report published in 2021 reminded us that: “There are two extremely different school systems in the country. One that is world-class and serves mainly the ‘haves’, the other, pertaining to the vast majority, that serves the ‘have nots’ and that is largely failing…”

Fixing that problem will require not only focusing on schools — such as employing specialist reading tutors. More than that, it will require will and hefty resources to ensure comprehensive, integrated, socio-economic support for children and their families from our most impoverished homes.

The society needs to ensure that those children have bus fare and lunch money to attend school, not just one or two days per week but every day; that those children from our poorest homes, who are invariably the ones most in need of specialised help, attend schools closest to them; that their parents, who are often illiterate or semi-literate — having been also disenfranchised as children — are exposed to parental training and best practices; and so forth.

Such an integrated, comprehensive approach will be expensive and can’t be short term.

We contend that the long-term reward would be a safer, more orderly and peaceful society, with high crime and anti-social behaviour brought to heel.