Look beyond the headlines and help our schools
THE EDITOR, Sir:
N O ONE wants to be associated with an educational institution labelled as a prison school. As a result, many school administrators are upset since the Jamaica Constabulary Force report on education and crime was tabled in Parliament. However, while it’s safe to say that the report is flawed and misrepresented in some ways, we should look beyond the headlines and see whether some good can emerge from this report.
As a society, we have been heading down the road of underperformance and underachievement of our young men for quite some time. This has resulted in many of our young men ending up in our penal institutions or dropping out of school. There are two schools of thought with regards to boys’ underachievement. First, there are those who locate the problem in relation to wider social changes and how this impacts males, particularly adolescent males, with regard to their perception of masculinity and schooling. Second, there are those who claim that boys’ underachievement is a direct result of the emphasis that has been placed on girls. Regardless of which theory you support, we urgently need to have a national intervention programme targeting the scores of unattached and at-risk males in the society.
FAMILY BREAKDOWN
Over the years, there has been – and there still is – a breakdown of the family as the primary agent of socialisation in the society. Needless to say, the Jamaican society has a significant percentage of dysfunctional families. The trend of families being dysfunctional began in the 1970s when many Jamaicans migrated to North America and the United Kingdom in search of a better life, leaving a gap regarding their parental responsibilities.
As a result, in many of our homes there was and still is little or no parental supervision. A common tendency in those splintered family types is juvenile delinquency. By the time the child reaches high school, that child is already a juvenile delinquent and, therefore, one step closer to prison.
To compound this problem, the Government’s decision in the 1990s to turn all secondary schools into high schools without investing heavily in the infrastructure and without providing the strong and continued support for these upgraded high schools has now returned to haunt us.
Third, the advent of the Grade Six Achievement Test has also contributed to this sad state of affairs. We continue to send all the top achievers to the traditional high schools while sending low-scoring students to the upgraded high schools. The Ministry of Education must make some policy changes to bring more equality to the education system for the primary users of the system, that is, our students.
MORE REFORM NEEDED
Despite having windows of excellence throughout the education system, much more reform is urgently needed to level the playing field in terms of giving all our students access to a quality education, regardless of socio-economic background.
This brings us to the fourth factor contributing to failure in the education system. The public’s negative perception of most of these schools listed in the report continues to do more harm than good to the morale of the students and teachers of such institutions.
Some schools are already viewed as ‘bad’ schools, so as soon as the student is enrolled in such an institution, he or she takes on the character and subculture of the ‘bad’ school.
If we are honest, all the schools listed in the report are struggling schools. They are struggling with student indiscipline as well as a scarcity of resources, both human and financial. In addition to putting police and the army on the ground in those schools, the education ministry should place social workers in those institutions as well. The ministry also needs to examine the student/guidance counsellor ratio in all our schools, with the intent to increase the number of guidance counsellors in our high schools. At least four guidance counsellors should be in each high school. The report on education and crime did not say schools are turning out criminals. The media, in search of sensationalism, was responsible for putting that twist to the story.
Instead of engaging in a blame game, we all need to examine ourselves as a society and determine in what way( s) we can help the schools in our communities to improve.