Nobel lessons on education for Jamaicans

THREE PROFESSORS, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, both of MIT, and Michael Kremer of Harvard, have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics for their research into the impediments to learning, how these can be removed, and alleviating poverty.

Quoting from an article in The New York Times, October 14, 2019, “The Nobel committee specifically highlighted a study Mr Kremer helped write that looked at groups of schoolchildren in Kenya in the mid-1990s. It found that access to extra textbooks did not improve most student outcomes – showing the impediment to learning was not a simple lack of resources.

“A subsequent experiment by Ms Duflo, Mr Banerjee and their co-authors identified a true barrier to student achievement: teaching methods that were insufficiently shaped to student need. Tutors for low-performing pupils in India improved achievement measurably, and lastingly.”

In the textbook study, it was found that high achievers benefited, but other children did not because the books were too difficult for them to read. Although these studies were carried out in Kenya and India, their importance to Jamaica should not be overlooked. Like these countries, we inherited from the British an educational system that favours the children who will earn places in the traditional high schools.

The National Standard Curriculum is so designed that a child who gets left behind at any point in any subject has little chance of catching up.

If half the children in grade one are not up to the mark at the end of Unit One, Term One, the teacher is not afforded the opportunity to reteach. She must move on. No wonder children lose interest and misbehave, making the teacher’s task even more difficult.

It is time to cut the curriculum, which, in spite of the Primary Exit Profile exam, is overloaded with content that children are expected to recall.

Instead, our emphasis should be on the children and making sure they become literate and numerate, and have an interest in learning.