Connecting the dots

There could be no contradiction in stating that all policyholders in this country are aware that quality education has been proven to be the panacea for many of society’s ills. The contradiction comes from the perplexity of there being too few approaches that demonstrate this knowledge.

Quality education provides a way out of extreme and generational poverty; it can and has been the foil against contracting diseases—particularly sexually transmitted diseases, a case in point being the education and awareness programmes that halted new infections of HIV not just in Guyana, but around the world. In short, in situations where ignorance can kill you, quality education eradicates that risk.

This may be superfluous, but it is worth pointing out here that the education being referred to is holistic, taking into account Maths, English and everything else taught in our schools along with a whole lot more, hence the qualification of it as quality education.

It would be fair to say that in a general sense the Maths and English—academic subjects overall—are covered. The standards may not be quite where we would like them to be, and the reach is undoubtedly inadequate, but obtaining basic education is possible. What is lacking are the other skills that would ensure that the output of all our schools is a rounded individual who is able to apply what he or she has been taught to not just a particular job but to life in general. Life skills are what they are called, and they allow for the average human to, among other things, use reason in such circumstances and situations he or she might be faced with.

An analogy can be made to working on a jigsaw puzzle or connecting the dots. Unless it can be reasoned that a curved piece and a flat one will not fit together, the puzzle will never be completed. Connecting the dots is a child’s game, which involves drawing lines from dot to dot in numerical order so that at the end a picture emerges. If a dot or dots are missed or the wrong numerical order is pursued, you may still get a picture. However it would be one that complicates rather than solves the puzzle.

Common sense, which as has been said is not so common anymore, is knowledge based and for humans, observatory in nature. There are ongoing artificial intelligence projects in the United States and other developed countries, some more advanced than others, to endow computers with common sense reasoning. Yet in the developing world and Guyana in particular, we continue to teach our children by rote rather than to have them observe and make decisions based on their own thought processes, condemning them to never being able to complete more than that single jigsaw puzzle; we are indeed guilty of doing them extreme harm.

Aside from the criminally minded, the psychopaths and the sociopaths, many of our children have taken the wrong turn because they did not stop to consider, or could not, their actions and the consequences that would follow. Even in cases where certain actions might not have been illegal, they could have been enough to drastically change the course of lives being the difference between opportunity lost and gained, or in worst case scenarios, life and death.

And yet, daily, we see the people setting policies failing to connect the dots. Simple examples include the lowering of the criteria for admission to nursing school and teachers’ training college some years ago and the low education level required for admission to the police training college. These decisions would have resulted in a higher output of trained nurses, teachers and police officers, but there would have been many of dubious value among them. Their contributions to their respective professions would reflect that lack, which cumulatively influences the service provided in total.

It should be clear by now that addressing the breakdown in our society, including curbing crime, improving the public health system and getting the fundamentals of education right, needs not just reaction but going back to the drawing board, so to speak, wherever necessary.