Dunce educators failing students
ALL THAT noise about those ‘Dunce’ backpacks has died down so quickly. On Friday, I googled ‘dunce backpack Jamaica’ and got 37,500 results in 0.19 seconds. A whole heap of people were nyamming up themselves at the start of the new school year. I didn’t bother to waste any time or energy writing about the non-issue. I knew that before long it would be history.
That’s a subject a lot of dunces fail. And I don’t mean those unfortunate students who are often marginalised at school and labelled as slow learners. Some so-called educators should be the ones carrying dunce backpacks. They do not seem to understand the history of oppression that has made schooling so traumatic for a lot of Jamaican students. Many of our educators keep repeating the same mistakes. As the famous quip puts it: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Albert Einstein is credited with that statement. I suppose it’s the kind of wisdom you would expect from a genius. But it wasn’t Einstein who came up with this insight. The Google Arts and Culture website confirms that, “Civil rights campaigner and feminist writer Rita Mae Brown is the real author of the phrase. . . . However, the idea of a link between repetition and insanity can be traced back to the 19th century.”
BILINGUAL PRIMARY EDUCATION ESSENTIAL
The home language of many children is Jamaican. At school, they are taught in English, a language they do not know. How and what are they going to learn? No wonder they are branded as dunces! For decades, linguists have been insisting that bilingual primary education is essential for students whose home language is Jamaican. In 1968, an essay by Robert Le Page, an Englishman who had come to teach at The University College of the West Indies, was published in the book, Language Problems of Developing Nations. Like many foreigners, LePage easily recognised that Creole languages like Jamaican are quite distinct from English.
He argued that, “The problem for most West Indian children in the Creole-English-speaking islands is not that of foreign-language learners of English or native speakers. Their Creole speech has no literary norm other than that of Standard English; but as a spoken language it has its own phonological, grammatical, lexical, and semantic structures, which differ, often quite sharply, from those of the spoken dialects that underlie the standard usage of the textbooks and of the examiners.”
Le Page described the dilemma of students trying to navigate between English and Creole: “Instead of being able to keep the two systems separate, therefore, the children try to make one composite system out of the vernacular they know in their homes and the model language they are supposedly taught in school; the result naturally satisfies nobody - not even the children, for whom it remains an artificial construct.”
Le Page also highlighted the issue of incompetent teachers: “The problem is greatly intensified by the fact that so many of the teachers are untrained, unsure of their own command of the model language, and therefore poor teachers of it.” Five and half decades later, there have been significant advances in teacher training. In most instances, primary school teachers can recognise the differences between English and Jamaican. And they are confident about their command of English.
JAMAICAN CREOLE ON THE CURRICULUM
Like Le Page, the Guyanese linguist Dennis Craig advocated the use of the home language as “a bridge to the language of the school.” Educators at the Ministry of Education are finally seeing the light. The National Standards Curriculum, which was introduced in 2018, acknowledges Jamaican Creole as a language to be used in teaching Grade 1 students. The Guide for Integrated studies is organised around Focus Questions. The first is, “How Do You Know Me?” What follows are “Attainment target(s)” and “Objective(s).” The targets are:
“Recognise, value and make distinctions between home language and SJE [Standard Jamaican English] to improve/acquire language and literacy competencies
Communicate with confidence and competence for different purposes and audiences, using SJE and JC [Jamaican Creole] appropriately and creatively.” The objectives are:
“Use home language/SJE to talk about themselves and their experiences Respond appropriately to questions and directions addressed in SJE Ask and respond appropriately to questions about self Describe self, others, objects and situations using appropriate words Make general statements about information collected about self and others.”
How are Grade 1 students, on their own, going to be able to “respond appropriately” to questions in English, a language they do not know? Teacher training in bilingual education is urgently needed if the grand targets and objectives of the National Standards Curriculum are to be met. Professor Emeritus Hubert Devonish, founder and former director of The Jamaican Language Unit (JLU) at The University of the West Indies, Mona, has designed an online M.A. in Dual Language/Multilingual Practice in Education, in collaboration with the current director of the JLU, Dr Joseph Farquharson.
The Ministry of Education must recognise that this innovative degree has the potential to revolutionise language learning. And must fully fund its implementation!
The abysmal performance of Jamaicans in the Programme for International Student Assessment administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is yet another a warning of the failings of our education system. But we did not need the OECD’s reminder. We already had the Patterson Report which has not been taken seriously enough. It still hasn’t been tabled in Parliament. Politicians cannot continue to evade damning truths. As a society, we cannot afford to keep on repeating our dread history. Pure lunacy! It certainly does not take a genius to figure that out.