SEA sickness

BitDepth#1192

AFTER THE SEA examination last week, Newsday posed a question to its followers on social media: “What are your memories of SEA/Common Entrance exams?”

I declined to answer. I had no hopeful or even funny stories. Indeed, all I can recall clearly in the year leading up to the exams – which I took after being moved from Tranquillity Primary, where I wasn’t doing well, to Romilly’s Preparatory – is a series of blinding headaches.

It took decades for me to learn to manage my stress migraines, stabbing shafts of agony that lanced through the top right of my skull like fish-gutting blades and left me helpless, unable to do more than whimper in a darkened room and wait for the triphammer throbbing to subside.

So my clearest memory of the morning I sat the Common Entrance was Arthur McCrae, a kindly handyman and long-term friend to my family, taking up his post outside QRC with a bottle of Limacol, a clean towel and a thermos of cold water, just in case I “did take een” and needed assistance.

School ended for me with sixth form. I was tired of the whole experience and was keen to do and to learn, not study to an increasingly irrelevant curriculum. It was a decision to take the professional’s path, though I did not know it then, a journey of continuous learning and adaptation.

Fifty years after I wandered out of the unfamiliar halls of QRC into the blinding midday sunlight after that exam, I have only one question for the scholars and intellects who do so little to change the SEA/CXC model of learning.

“Would you, by choice, return to that methodology to learn anything you consider of value today?”

Looking back at everything I learned at school, I can point to my teachers in English literature and language, some experiences in the sciences that urged my curiosity about the rigour of the scientific method and Archie Edwards, my General Paper teacher, for the most significant things that live with me today.

Foremost among them was Edwards’ laser-clear illumination of a single principle, “We go to school to learn how to learn.”

Today, there is surely need for a common platform of learning, things that we all know so that there is mutual understanding of basic principles. Call it the
lingua franca of schooling.

Beyond that, we need a wide base of possibilities, exposure to concepts and principles that simply don’t exist in the school curriculum today.

Railing against the SEA and the CXC because of the stress they cause is valid, but the damage they wreak is even greater now, because they are part of an education system that prepares children for a world that simply doesn’t exist any more.

General education was designed for a cycle of life that held fast for centuries.

Learn common basics. Select specialty study that defined a career path.

Attain the best qualifications for that career. Get a job in that career. Advance incrementally. Retire. Die.

But what happens when entire careers appear and disappear like a hibiscus flower?

We are all now professionals, whether we understand that or not. Learning will not end when we graduate for the last time. To survive, we will need to be scholars for life.

That is not what the SEA and CXC teach today’s children, and for that reason they must be rapidly rethought, reconsidered and re-engineered to create the resource of skill that this century will demand.

Any politician who stands in the way of that should be briskly sidelined for the good of the nation.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there