I refer to your Sunday Stabroek, April 4 editorial on the issue of ‘Violence in schools.’ Yes, I agree with you. The Minister of Education is the outright winner of the “2010 award for the most unmitigated drivel uttered by a member of Cabinet this year.” The Minister’s refusal to acknowledge that the level of violence in some schools in certain areas is unacceptable, and that the methods invoked so far in response to the increasing violence have not produced the desired results is nothing less than him burying his head in the sand. It has been said that denial and delusion are a lethal combination. The Minister is in a state of denial and suffers from the delusion caused by the misinterpretation of statistics.
I can recall the story told by my then Maths teacher. He told the class the story of a certain Maths teacher in another school who boasted that he had achieved a 100% pass rate in CXC Maths the year before. On the surface, that was an impressive statistic. But one shrewd parent decided to probe a bit further and asked the teacher: “Well, how many students did you send up for the exam?” His response: “One student.” Yes indeed, the Maths teacher had scored 100% passes! The statistic was accurate but misleading! Decision-makers, like the Minister, should be wary of misleading statistics.
Contrast, if you will, the utterances of the Minister of Labour and Social Services who, it is reported, disclosed that a survey revealed that 29% of the work force is uneducated and around 58% has only primary to secondary education. These are disturbing statistics and yet another indictment of the Ministry of Education. While the President and the Minister of Finance are doing their utmost to boost education, by pumping in billions of dollars into the educational sector, launching ambitious programmes to computerize all secondary schools by 2013, purchasing hundreds of computers, etc, the Ministry of Education has nothing to show for such massive injections of capital. Wrong. They do. They have the annual dismal performance of students at the General Assessment and CXC levels. The Ministry of Education it seems has failed to get the simple input/output equation right, namely, the output should approximate, if not equal, the input.
But all is not lost. Help is on the way. A small group of individuals – educators, education technologists and IT specialists – have done, with the barest minimum of resources, what the Ministry of Education with its host of education, communication, curriculum development, research and IT specialists, and God-knows-who else, and vast technical resources have failed to do over the past seven years. They have developed a computer-assisted learning programme for Maths, English and IT and put demo samples of it free online! My son, who was preparing to write the General Assessment exam held a week ago, attends a well known primary school in Georgetown and was able to go online, like dozens of other students, and do an interactive quiz on Maths and English for the General Assessment and got his instant score and feedback! And the beauty of it was that it cost him nothing. It was free! Isn’t that amazing? He scored 80% on the Maths quiz and after that he was confident and ready for the real exam. Should you care to check it out the website address is: www.bstoolkit.com
Now tell me, shouldn’t the Ministry of Education, with the billions of dollars at its disposal, be able to do something like that? The Ministry of Education should stop sitting on its hands and start using the power of technology to transform the education of our workforce. Or, is it that they are afraid of the technology?
Yours faithfully,
James Melville
