The reading question – again

DON ROBOTHAM, the anthropologist and public intellectual who comments frequently on Jamaica’s political economy, delivered what ought not to have been a surprising, yet still deeply disturbing, anecdote in a column in this newspaper on Sunday.

An unnamed but well-known Jamaican firm, he reported, did an evaluation of its employees, all of whom had gone to high school, many of whom had achieved passes in at least one subject in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams. The fact that they attended high school presumes that these workers were first educated at the primary level and were assessed at grade six for age-related competence in English, mathematics, and basic science. Assuming that they completed high school at grade 11, they would have spent five years in the secondary system. In that scenario, they had at least 11 years of formal education.

But Professor Robotham revealed that the company’s analysis showed the workers’ literacy to be generally at grade-five level and that they were “particularly weak in their reading skills”.

On the face of it, there are legitimate questions to be asked, and possibly debated, about the robustness of the company’s recruiting practices. Nonetheless, the findings underline the deep crisis in education in Jamaica – including the low level of literacy in the adult population – and how that impacts and shapes an economy trapped in primary production, whether goods and services.

“There will be no moving out of this low-tech trap and no increased production unless we break the back of this widespread adult illiteracy in our society,” Dr Robotham wrote. “Low literacy affects everything, including crime and violence.”

MASSIVE ASSAULT

Professor Robotham’s analysis, put another way, is that without a massive assault on this problem of low levels of literacy, Jamaica can, at best, hope for only marginal gains in its labour productivity, which has declined at an annual rate of around one per cent over the past four decades. Neither can the country expect growth beyond the current constricted rates despite great strides in macroeconomic stability over the last dozen years.

Sustainably enhancing productivity will not be achieved without constructing a primary foundation in education, with a focus on literacy. Or as Professor Robotham put it: “You cannot impart high-level skills to a population with limited reading skills.”

In some respects, Dr Robotham’s argument echoes that of the Orlando Patterson Commission on transforming the education sector, with its proposal for redirecting some of the over J$14 billion a year collected by HEART, the skills development agency, to early childhood/primary education.

That report – which, unfortunately, has neither been tabled in Parliament nor subjected to any intensive government-led debate, despite it, ostensibly, being implemented – noted that a third of Jamaican students complete their primary education illiterate and that nearly six in 10 could extract basic information from simple English sentences. Last year’s results from the Primary Exile Profile (PEP) exams for grade-six students (generally 12 year olds) showed that over 40 per cent did not meet the standards to be considered proficient in language arts.

These weaknesses carry over into the secondary system, where just under three in 10 students who write the CSEC exams achieve passes in five subjects, including maths and English, in a single sitting. Only 27 per cent of the relevant Jamaican age cohort is enrolled in tertiary education institutions of all kinds, and the evidence, empirical and anecdotal, suggests that a large proportion of these students struggle with English.

FOCUS ON LITERACY

Professor Robotham’s suggestion for tackling this national emergency is a major government focus on literacy, with a dedicated portfolio minister for the subject, supported by an army of reading specialists.

“We must meet our children where they are and teach English as the foreign language it is,” he said. “The considerable expertise in The University of the West Indies’ School of Education needs to be mobilised.”

The Gleaner would add, too, the Jamaican Language Unit in the Department of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy at the UWI, Mona.

Hoping to achieve the same ends espoused by Professor Robotham, this newspaper has several times over the past year suggested a reset of Jamaica’s primary schools. Their mission in this period of crisis must be to produce children who read and comprehend and do sums at their age and grade levels.

Children, in that context, would be removed from the escalator that automatically takes them from one grade to the next, no matter their literacy levels.

We have proposed that Jamaica borrow from the US state of Mississippi (and other southern states) where, backed by legislation, and aggressively supported by reading/literacy initiatives, automatic promotion systems were dismantled.

A decade ago, Mississippi, which had the secondworst reading results, is now in the top 20. In the mid-2010s, only 75 per cent of Mississippi’s students graduated from high school. It is now closer to 90 per cent. A large part of what has made the difference is reading.

Jamaica’s education minister, Fayval Williams, will rightly point to her recent initiatives to promote and enhance reading in the island’s primary and secondary schools or the promise of an intervention such as one being undertaken at Denham Town High School. But those programmes lack the mobilisation and urgency warranted by the deep crisis of literacy facing Jamaica.

Hopefully, Professor Robotham’s intervention will help to concentrate minds on the need for speedy and deep, fundamental action.

The opinions on this page, except for The Editorial, do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Gleaner.