Revolution of healthy socialisation needed – Thwaites
WHILE LAUDING the Government for its efforts to certify early childhood institutions, Opposition Spokesman on Education Ronald Thwaites has said that this is insufficient to bring about the revolution of care and healthy socialisation required for infants and young children.
He reasons that the deficiencies in family and community structure require a complete reorientation of approach. “The acquisition of basic social skills and the embedding of appropriate behaviour habits must now become as high a priority as the development of language and the measurement, competences.
“The values of honesty, truthfulness, respect for life, respect for law, discipline and productivity, faithfulness, compassion, and commitment have to be infused from the earliest level into our young children,” Thwaites said in his contribution to the Sectoral Debate in Parliament on Tuesday.
Thwaites indicated that the problem with the national objectives being pursued by the Government in the education sector was not the achievement of educational qualifications, but the “social deficiencies that were robbing the benefit of the capital that the Government, parents, and philanthropists offered to the education system. If you improve family life, you improve the education system”.
“This is the only antidote to the diarrhoea of $20 billion, or more, that we double-spend on remedial education every year, not to mention the chronic loss of productivity and the decline of social capital,” said Thwaites.