Systematic Ignorance
School books are hardly being read. The local news is hardly
being watched. The important news in the dailies is not being read enough. We
have become fascinated only with the murder or demise of our citizenry. Our
children are spending an inordinate amount of time playing video games and
watching television programs that are aiding them in poor decision making. Our
national heroes are dying out and our children don’t know who these Bahamian
legends are. We are losing our ability to think.
The first few years of a child’s life are extremely
important because he/she has to learn a solid foundation in order to be
successful throughout their educational life.
This is not happening and as such our children are becoming lost in a
world where it is extremely difficult to survive without basic reading and
mathematical skills. We see the early signs of failure but we have failed to
act accordingly.
Our current educational system is not effective and many of
our children are falling victim to the systematic ignorance that has been
choking their development and ultimately our citizenry for the better part of
20 years. Ill prepared students create subcultures in our society, many of
these dedicated to criminal behavior and social decay. Democratic National
Alliance (DNA) Leader Branville McCartney was spot on when he said that we need
to prepare our children for the world stage and for the 21st
century.
But why haven’t we been successful
in our quest as a country to perform this task? The educational system has
failed miserably as our students are leaving school in June of each year and
they can’t even read or construct a sentence? What will we expect these
children to do in order to support themselves? The odds against them are
stacked and they haven’t even started their career as yet.
I ask the government of the Bahamas
to construct and implement an effective educational plan for our country for
the next 10 years. We know that we will borrow millions of dollars per year and
we seem to have an idea on how many jobs will be needed in the next few years;
but what about the plan to ensure that our children are able to compete on the
world stage? When will this important initiative be launched? When will the
educational system be revamped or restructured to meet the needs of our
students who are now technologically savvy and need a curriculum that uses the
latest technologies as opposed to a 1990’s system?
Every so often I come into
firsthand contact with students who leave high school with nothing but an
attendance certificate. I always recall my amazement when speaking to several
recent female graduates this year. I was assisting them with their resume and
told them that they did not record their BGCSE and BJC passes. I learned that they
had no passes to put on their resume. The sad part about this reality is that
they intend to be hired making way above minimum wage. They don’t understand
their predicament until it slaps them in the face and they are continuously
denied employment.
For many of them, they give up and
resort to hanging out on the blocks where they start to engage in nefarious
activities and drinking alcohol. Our recent graduates sink into a dejected
state and become delusional about their current status. This surely should not
be what we as a country want for some of our youth.
There are a handful of students who
thrive in the current educational system because of sheer will and some parents
and guardians who make the required sacrifices. To these students and parents,
I commend you for a job well done. There are also many parents who in my view
really need psychiatric help. Some of their priorities are all mixed up. How is
it plausible that parents attend political rally after political rally and fail
to attend one PTA meeting? How is it that parents don’t even oversee their
children’s homework and test scores? The country needs these parents to become
a part of the educational process and take an active role in their children’s development.
Someone once said, “Where ignorance
is blessed it is folly to be wise”. Can
this be applied to the inherent lack of organization and strategic commitment
of our elected leaders to implement an effective educational system? Education
is a national issue, but the government of the country needs to do more.
We can ill afford to allow our
children to continually pass through a system that directly contributes to
their ignorance. They will become adults one day. We need an educational system
that challenges them to think, be creative and that uses current day technology.
We need a system that teaches our children what it is to be truly Bahamian.
To use a manufacturing term, the
assembly line (our educational system) is filled with products that will soon need to be recalled. I
believe that a good education is one of the keys to be successful and that our
leaders and the country need to be honest and admit that we need an immediate
system change. Education receiving the lion share of the annual budget has
become a smoke screen and fancy marketing ploys have not netted the results
that we need as a country. We can’t expect to do the same thing and expect
different results.
Dehavilland Moss
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