Cancel exams: Rethink education

THIS PANDEMIC has provided many important lessons, and right there at the top is the drastic need to reform education. We can’t seriously think that we are going to take our students traumatised by the isolation of this pandemic, throw them back into schools and conduct business as usual.

Here’s what we really need to do.

1. Create a transition to a new and improved model of education that encourages students to explore their needs and interests rather than concentrate on passing endless, useless exams. This year there should be no exams and no pressure to take SEA or CXC. Students don’t need that stress.

2. Address students’ psychological and social needs. Teachers need to tune into their students’ mental health needs and provide reading and writing assignments that allow children to understand and express how they are feeling.

3. Make all learning relevant. If we are going to recapture the pool of lost children and teenagers who disappeared from school during this pandemic, then we have to come good. Boring, rote learning and studying for subjects isn’t going to cut the mustard. Students must feel connected to school in ways they never did before. They must feel that school will address their needs.

4. Concentrate on more interaction among students. Provide safe activities for students to participate in group activities and sports. Enlist the help of volunteers for breakout groups to talk about issues and feelings that students experienced in the last year and talk about how they feel learning can best take place now. What do students want to get out of learning? Plan activities that help students to grow personally and socially.

5. Address issues like relationships, drugs, anxiety, insecurity, anger and depression. If we don’t do this, we will have more dropouts and more bullying.

6. Explore new and relevant literature to be used in schools. It’s time to get away from a prescribed CXC reading list. Students need to read a wide variety of literature and read at least one book a month. Questions on literature exams must make students think of which book they read the best answers that question rather than regurgitating the elements of literature they memorised from one book. Time to realise we’re short-changing students by not giving them enough opportunities to think.

7. Incorporate service learning in the curriculum. It builds empathy and community spirit. Students get to develop organisational and business skills, time management and creativity. Universities abroad want to see service-learning experience as much as academic skills in the students they accept. It’s time for our universities to stress the need for community service too.

8. Ban homework for this year, and drastically reduce it in the future. As adults we would be livid if someone told us we had four hours of “homework” to complete after an eight-hour workday, but we burden students with homework every day.

9. Make students less dependent on after-school lessons. Let me get this straight: Students go to school all day, then go to extra lessons and then have about four hours of homework a day and they still can’t master a subject? Something is wrong. We have to stop pretending this is “normal.”

10. Target leadership skills in school. What are we doing to create leaders for tomorrow? The literature students read and activities they participate in, like debates, speeches, presentations and group projects, help to develop these skills. We need to create more activities that encourage leadership skills.

In short, make school exciting and relevant for all of our students. Our children have been through a war with a disease that isolated and frightened them. Their personal, psychological and social needs must be addressed so they can learn easily and effectively. It’s time to revolutionise learning in our schools and make it exciting exploration that rarely takes place in a textbook.

We need to spark creativity, nurture empathy, encourage students to read and write so that they can understand their own educational needs better and advocate for them.

This pandemic stopped us in our tracks, and we can’t just leap into what we did in the past. We have the perfect opportunity to make this a transitional period to find a way forward to a better education.

Our children had no control over their lives in this pandemic. They made many sacrifices this last year. We have to create a better future for them now by rethinking what education should really look like in post-pandemic Trinidad and Tobago.