Crime of automatic promotion
THE TITLE is intended to startle. A crime is an intentional or reckless act or omission which harms another. That is what the practice of automatic promotion in our schools does. And according to the minister of education’s statement in Parliament last week, we are about to do it again, only this time in aggravated circumstances.
Eyes gleaming with hope, old Mr Turnbull had travelled from the country with his soon-to-be 13-yearold grandson to see me at the Ministry of Education. He who, as he said, had never passed “6th Book”, was seeking help for the boy he was raising in the absence of responsible parents, to start high school that September.
Poor as he was, he would manage the auxiliary fee a little at a time, but the book list which would cost more than $12,000 was beyond him – thus the trip to town. Never mind that he was nursing a painful hernia. It was more than two years he had been waiting to get it cut at the parish hospital. Two years and counting, pain, disability and embarrassment because the private doctor’s fee was just impossible.
All that and more, but the Spiritinspired cause of his life was to see this grandson “pass the worst”. Full of pride and humility at the same time, he brought me a piece of yam and a few bananas wrapped up in old Gleaner. Would I accept them? Would I help the quiet boy with the puzzled look to achieve what life had never offered him? “I teach him manners, sar. Even when I cyan’t manage to sen him go a school, him go a Adventist church regular.”Thank God!
Getting the books and supplies was the easy part. Each year taxpayers spend nearly a billion dollars to buy texts, a fair proportion of which are never used. Even a nice school bag was available. As an afterthought, I asked to see the boy’s GSAT scores, and my admiration and reverence for everything, up to then, turned into disillusionment. His language arts and numeracy grades were below 30.
The young man could barely read, and basic maths skills, except how to get the right change when you are sent to the shop, were absent. This after six years of primary schooling! You should have seen his graduation picture.
MAKES NO SENSE
Stop! It makes no sense to send a child to high school who can’t read, compute and behave themselves satisfactorily. It is pointless to promote anybody on the basis of age rather than merit.
Sadly but truthfully, there are multiple thousands of young Turnbulls who will be assigned to high schools later this month. Only this year, their predicament and ours, will be worse
September morning will find them having been out of school for almost six months. Many, all but a few, will have regressed considerably.
As a society, our disrespect for Mr Turnbull and his kind will lead us, not with malicious intent but with damaging and hurtful consequences, to promote children to a higher grade without assurance that they have achieved mastery of the material required to manage the work in the new class.
This is a social crime more serious than that of letting people into Jamaica without adequate testing during a time of plague. Yes, more harmful because the chances of recovery, as the results show and the lives attest years after, are very, very slim.
Three weeks or so of evaluation at the start of the new school year is a well-meaning charade. When the overcrowded high school finds out what they already expect, that the likes of young Turnbull can’t read many or any of the heavy bag of books he carries every day, what are they equipped to do to really help?
Where is the extra money in the COVID-19 supplementary estimates being hustled through Parliament this week, to afford the vital assault of illiteracy in our schools? Are we realistic enough to resile from the irresponsible mistake of telling parents that the Government would pay for all a school needs to offer excellent education? (This while they waste some 80 billion on gambling and countless billions on cigarettes and rum). Finally, are we humble enough to accept Peter Bunting’s suggestion that we need a national task force, led by the National Council on Education, to help the overwhelmed ministry, teachers and parents to craft, urgently, a thorough remedial and renewal plan for education?
Since any of that is yet to happen and the cruelty of automatic promotion seems inevitable, last Tuesday I begged Minister Samuda to mandate schools, especially at the grade 7 level, to suspend teaching the new syllabus until there is an assurance that the basic skills to absorb that work are achieved. If we were serious about this task, we would start school back in August to make up for lost time. If catching up were to take the whole of next academic year, it would be worthwhile.
I accept responsibility for not more forcefully confronting the social crime of automatic promotion in schools when I had some authority over the system. I bowed too easily in the face of the huge infrastructural and human resource obstacles which correction would entail. But now, I am remembering Mr Turnbull’s trusting eyes and his grandson’s soon-to-be disappointed fate.
We can’t afford to continue this way.