Pundit says education minister has failed

A prominent religious leader has called for the reorganisation of the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) examinations saying the present system is one of streaming where “all the great students” are placed in one school while the rest are placed in “five year babysitting factories.”

Pundit Satyanand Maharaj, in a media release, said Education Minister Anthony Garcia has “presided over the steady but predictable erosion of the quality of education in Trinidad and Tobago” as nearly 50 per cent of the student population had “failed either math, English and creative writing or all three.”

“The minister celebrated the few at the top of the SEA results but has ignored the thousands at the bottom of the SEA results. These children are being told that they are not good enough and will have to settle for the crumbs of life.”

Maharaj said government secondary schools are places where teachers are “tested to the limit by pupils who are unable to cope with a standardised syllabus because of their lack of readiness for secondary school and with no regard for a different approach based on multiple intelligence.”

He said those same students would again be tested when they write the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams as “only the strong and resilient will survive or catch up with their peers who had passed for prestige schools.”

“It is time we review this system of discrimination where our most precious resource, our children are placed. We need an education system that lifts all children and caters to their natural and inborn abilities. It is time we look at the damage that the present education system, born of a colonial past, inflicts on the most innocent – our children. It is time that teachers get the support that they deserve as they mould the young and impressionable minds.” He said Garcia had not offered an alternative strategy or plan to address the “massive and unexplained failure rate in the education system” except for reducing the school feeding program, firing UTT lecturers, stopping the completion of schools in progress, closing down private secondary schools, and celebrating the top ten SEA students.