Anti-sports bias
ISERIOUSLY disagree with the minister of education, Ronald Thwaites, on the direction he is going with regard to the transfer of students with special sports skills.
The minister, no doubt, means well, and is clearly operating on the premise that high school should be essentially about academic pursuits. But stopping students with special sporting abilities from moving to schools that will enhance their talent is completely unfair.
In this day and age, schools cannot merely be about academic subjects. Education has a far broader focus. As long as sport is one of the skills the society holds dear – and that is the case in Jamaica – high schools have a duty to ensure that this be paramount in our high- school curricula. Gone are the days when education was exclusively reading, writing, ’ rithmetic. Education, like every other form of human endeavour, must reflect its time, and sports is just as valid a career option nowadays as, say, art, which continues to be a staple in many high schools.
Many of us make the assumption that taking part in sports in high schools is one of the primary reasons why students don’t do well, but that is simply not true.
My good friend and media colleague, Oral Tracey, helped me with some figures that may astonish you. At the end of the 2013 school year, 42,200 students graduated from grade 11 in all high schools in Jamaica. Exactly 6,922 of them did not sit the CSEC exams because they were just not qualified to do that, while 4,971 did not pass a single subject.
ALARMING STATS
Between those who didn’t sit any subjects because they were just not equipped, and those who didn’t pass anything, we get a combined total 11,893. That’s 28.2 per cent of the total cohort of grade 11 graduates last year. This means that more than a quarter of the students who graduated from high school last year did not pass any subjects at all.
Even if we assume that a quarter of those were seriously involved in sports, that still leaves us with somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 students who didn’t do sports, but who left high school last year with basically nothing to show for it..
Once it is established that, by far, the greater number of school leavers who don’t do well in academics did not take part in any high level of sports, we should give the non-performing sports students a chance to show their skill, and must allow them to move to schools that have programmes to enhance their abilities.
If they don’t do well in academics, that’s bad, but they would be doing no worse than those who didn’t do sports, and, therefore, should not be singled out or discriminated against.
All this does raise the question as to what ‘ punishment’ is in place for those non- sports-playing high-schoolers who are not doing well in class. We take away the privilege and joy of representing your school in sports from students if they are not functioning at a certain academic standard, but the nonsports students who are floundering along with poor grades can still take part in the drama club, cadet corps, or whatever. Something has got to be wrong with that!
BETTER PROGRAMMES
Not all schools are equal. Some have better academic programmes, others have better sports programmes. If it isn’t wrong to want to move my child from a ‘low-grade’ high school, to one of better academic repute, it can’t be wrong to want to move him from a school with a non-existent sports programme, or one of inferior quality, to one that’s serious about sports, if he has a serious sports talent.
The majority of those who have excelled in sports for Jamaica, bringing us so much glory and recognition, were either transferred, or were part of schools with serious programmes for the sport in which they were involved. Stopping transfers of sports students could help to retard our sporting legacy and stop future champions from being developed.
The minister needs to rethink this one.