Look, to this day, cemented in my brain are the words of my grade two teacher, the issue pertained to the first English composition that I wrote, I believe that would have been Myself as A Dog, something to that effect , “ Etta Thorpe, think of your composition as a meal, would you have your ice cream on top of your rice and peas and chicken” Of course, now I do have desert before my main meal, but that’s beside the point, that simple statement formed the groundwork for my thought processes.
That said, I believe it’s a child’s solid early childhood education that propel their development for curiosity and creativity. It’s no secret that if a child gets the right nurturing and the fighting chance, unequivocally, they can write their own ticket to higher education every step of the way; providing that child has the capacity for compus mentis, all other things being equal.
The problem I have found worldwide, more the rule rather than the exception, is that education curricula are stuck at a place in which regurgitation verbatim is king. Hence, children are not able to achieve higher levels of critical thinking that involve the tenets of applying learned material, evaluating between nuances of facts and synthesizing critical mass of ideas where logic is concerned.
Thus, perpetuating the manifestation of the myth that colleges actually teaches one to think, when in fact, doing well at the tertiary level is understanding that fifty percent of what you digest in college depends on your self-learning simulation of inductive and deductive reasoning. Whereas, the other thirty percent is based on interaction with peers of one’s caliber and the remaining twenty percent depends on the professor’s deliverance of the material.
Needless to say, in the grand scheme of things, the majority of college graduates are left clueless and burdened with school loans at the bottom of the pyramid with useless pieces of paper that render most unemployable.
Suffice to say, on the periphery, the fringe or the margin of society exists a politician’s dream base, that is, the unskilled, the loss and the forgotten.
What is the solution going forward for Jamaica, and the answer would have to be one of long term strategic planning and paradigm shifts in the educational system. Besides, retrofitting schools with educators that are respected and revered, most importantly, is instilling in the young, patriotism, courteousness and civility.
