President hands over $1M to Cyril Potter College for STEM focus
technological changes that will open opportunities for school-leavers to participate in a competitive economy,” Granger said.
He added “It takes an efficient education system to train the architects, contractors and construction workers to build our houses; computer scientists to enhance our knowledge and expedite our transactions; and medical doctors and technologists to protect us from epidemic disease or to cure our everyday disorder; train thousands of persons in manufacturing to fabricate machines to process foods and make utensils; miners to produce bauxite, diamonds, gold and manganese; train young people, to encourage them to be inventive and innovative and to provide them with the opportunities to develop practical solutions to the physical challenges we face; and train a generation of teachers to produce new textbooks to support the new teaching and to devise new techniques to transform our lives”.
He contended again that the untrained teacher has no place in the system.
“The untrained teacher has no place in the future of our educational system. I like to use the analogy about flying in an aeroplane. No one would fly in an aeroplane piloted by someone, who is not trained. So why should anyone allow an untrained teacher to be tasked with educating children? Trained teachers are essential to halting the decline in educational standards. We are facing a crisis in primary education with shockingly high dropout rates and abysmally low pass rates at the National Grade Six Assessment. Improve-ment in educational attainment, countrywide, cannot be achieved unless we populate all of our schools with trained teachers,” the President said. Rowe said that the College will be embarking on an evaluation of its approach to the subjects particularly Mathematics and will be working closely with the Ministry of Education to ensure that all weaknesses are addressed.
“CPCE is also concerned about the overall decline in the performance of Mathematics in schools as is evident in, for example, the results of the 2016 National Grade Six Assessment. We intend to review our approaches to the delivery of the Mathematics programme and would like to take this opportunity to recognise our Ministry of Education’s Plan of Action to improve the performance of Mathematics, in this instance, at the Grade Six level,” she said.
The Best Graduating Student this year was Hirannie Persaud. Over 400 teachers graduated with Associate Degrees and Trained Teacher’s Certificates in several programmes including Early Childhood, Primary, Secondary Academic, Secondary Pre- Vocational and Technical Instruction.