‘Lifting’ students skills
LITERACY and numeracy woes among school students in this digital age is posing a major challenge for professions to usher in new graduates.
An inability to critically think has also been touted as the side effect of reading withdrawals, but the task that the Education Ministry now has to achieve is how to lift the students’ reading skills.
At the recent Fiji Law Society (FLS) annual convention, Ministry of Education permanent secretary Selina Kuruleca said some of the tools to produce quality graduates included reading skills and comprehension, speaking, critical thinking, writing and active listening.
“If you go right across any of the industries, the first task is either reading or speaking,” Ms Kuruleca said.
“Now, when we’re talking about reading, what are we talking about? Are we talking about reading in our mother tongue? Are we talking about reading in our second language?
“At the Ministry of Education, we just want to start with, ‘let’s read’. Let us read. You need to read before we can have reading comprehension.
“Let’s start by keeping it very simple. Let us teach our children through our own modelling behaviour the critical aspect of being able to read.
“Our recent examination results indicate there is a lot of work that has been done, but there is a lot more critical and very necessary work left to be done.
“So, the starting point for me, whether it’s the law industry, tourism industry, manufacturing, construction, is the ability to read and communicate.
“Reading in the mother tongue, reading in a second language, reading in any language must be done.”
Ms Kuruleca also spoke about the Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) program that was present in schools, and many people had exited the school system after being a part of the program.
“But what about the journey to school? How many of our children can read the road signs? How many of our children know how to get from point A to point B? Do you ask them to read road signs and write down or draw a map of how to get from point A to point B?
“Reading the Bible, faithbased texts, reading the newspaper, reading WhatsApp, reading Twitter and of course, reading everything that’s on Facebook.
“Reading means working with the first teacher and the first classroom; parents and guardians, families, and friends, reading with a child every day for at least 30 minutes a day.
“And then from the reading we go into other aspects of developing their comprehension skills, thinking skills, critical thinking skills, then being able to write, writing well before they become your law students and eventually, lawyers.
“The Education Ministry has journeyed over a long period of time and if you watch this journey, you will see that through withdrawal is the ability to communicate and using different modes or means of communication.”
According to Ms Kuruleca, the ministry was investing heavily in education and needed to equip the students with considerable life skills which would ultimately help whichever field of study they decide to pursue.
She added that many students who scored very good marks did not settle for FNU, USP or UniFiji; rather, they wanted to go overseas.
“So, that’s the other side of this, preparing our students. Are we preparing them to go over and come back? Are we preparing them just to go, and take all that investment that we’ve put in them away with them?”
With regards to law specifically, Ms Kuruleca suggested that law firms could be inclined to have students a part of their offices even while they were in high school.
“How about increasing access to scholarships, increasing access to practical attachments to your law firms? How about increasing access to our children to come to your law firms even before they start law school?
“How about having this as part of the ongoing training in secondary school where they come for a day or week, hang out with Wiley Clarke and team and go okay, maybe this is something that I would like to do.
“To me, that’s part of the work that we need to do at the Ministry of Education if we’re going to pump out lawyers that can be transformative.
“At the University of Fiji, Madam Shaista Shamim proposes that the Fiji Law Society pay ongoing attention to legal education in Fiji and encourage lawyers to go beyond LLB and to upskill by doing masters and PhDs.
“There are only three Fijian PhD holders of law in Fiji, two at the University of Fiji and one at FNU. So, with limited highly qualified law lecturers, teaching law very well, all of the time, has posed some challenges.
“This in turn hinders the development of law in Fiji, including drafting legislation, which is desperately needed in many ways. A good lawyer does not necessarily make a good law lecturer.
“Teaching law is not the same as practising law. At the same time, teaching law by using practitioners, as the University of Fiji is doing, makes a student a better lawyer in the end.”
Ms Kuruleca added the board of legal education needs to be supported by the legal community, and the Education Ministry would continue to work with the office of the SolicitorGeneral to review education legislation.