A most brutal realisation

It is heartening to know that no less a person than the Prime Minister has finally and openly acknowledged the stark connection between our dysfunctional education system and the elevated level of crime and criminality plaguing the country.

In admitting the significant deficiencies of the education system, the fundamental question ought to be, what is going to be done about it, given its detrimental impact on the overall economy and our quality of life.

The alarming number of young people who are rejecting the school system and instead being attracted to a life of crime has now hopefully been placed on front-burner from a national security perspective. This represents a long-overdue, sober admission and offers renewed hope for the radical overhaul of the education system.

TTUTA has repeatedly pointed out that if you do not commit sufficient resources to quality education, then you will ultimately have to spend it on national and social security – a stark reality that has come home to us as a society. Quality education is about ensuring that schools meet the needs of all their students and not just a minority.

Back in April 2021, TTUTA made a passionate call for the reconfiguration of the education system in this column titled Failing Our Boys, wherein the irrelevance of the education system to many of our young men was identified as the main reason for its rejection. Indeed, the nexus between schooling and gang affiliation was identified as a new and prominent feature of our current education system.

In alluding to the large number of students who are "passing through" the education system, the Prime Minister quite rightly raised the question of value for money, mindful of the huge quanta of resources that have and continue to be committed to education and the returns the country is deriving on that significant investment.

Again, this is a question TTUTA has posed in the past, mindful of the large number of students who emerge annually from the secondary education system as "certified failures" owing to the continued perpetuation of an elitist education model that is based on an antiquated philosophy of education. The assumptions upon which this model has been premised do not hold for a large number of our students; a fact that TTUTA has repeatedly identified.

In its relentless call for educational transformation based on modern notions of education being the means by which people are empowered to realise their full potential, the "one cap fits all" approach was highlighted as a major hindrance and antithetical to the notion of quality education.

The narrowing of the curriculum, especially at the secondary level, with the steady and gradual marginalisation of technical-vocational education over the past two decades, has proven to be to our social and economic detriment.

The naive fallacy of children graduating from secondary school, regardless of their readiness or capacity to take full advantage of the schooling opportunity, was a major basis for the objection to the introduction of universal secondary education. Indeed, the then national task force on education resigned in protest at this blatant political move.

Our quest to harmonise under the misguided definition of "prestige" has been suffocating many schools into places of frustration, anger and resentment on the part of many students, the inevitable net outcome of which, coupled with abdication of parental responsibilities, is deviance. The concomitant frustration and feelings of helplessness of teachers in many secondary schools has assumed new and alarming proportions.

This has consistently been the mantra of our social scientists, but successive governments have refused to act decisively to undertake the overhaul needed in the interest of the country, opting instead to tinker in a piecemeal, cosmetic manner to appease sectoral interests.

It is hoped that the Prime Minister and his government will now act decisively to effect fundamental change, biting the proverbial political bullet to act in the best long-term interest of the country.

Mindful that such change will meet with fierce resistance, especially from those who benefit from the preservation of the status quo, fixing an education system that has been allowed to go awry under our complacent political noses will take time and significant political will. But time is no longer a luxury.

An excellent place to begin would be to resuscitate the technical-vocational sector with immediate effect, beginning with the recruitment of teachers to fill the many existing vacancies, and the allocation of adequate resources to give this sector prominence in the system once again.