The entire country is failing, let’s focus on that, can we ?

There is a tendency in this country to focus on the peripheral issues and avoid serious debate and analysis of the real issues facing Jamaica.

If we want a particular outcome, our policy makers aided by a largely lazy media, (who only shows up and press  conferences to be feted with BS), throws out stuff into the open and like piranhas in the Amazon, we all swarm and devour it until its all done.

We are given bait and before we know it, we are reeled in at the end of a line and wondered what the heck happened, but once again it would have been too late.

There is a saying in an Eastern Caribbean country that goes like this ” Fish get caught by their mouth”.  (Meaning gullible people often get caught by bait.)

We speak for example about our failing education system and before you know it the discussion is all  about, who takes what from whom and who is a mongrel dog and who is injected by cocaine.

Lost in all of this, is the only thing that should be important at this time and its how do we put together a comprehensive plan to overhaul  the entire educational system, to produce a particular outcome.

The first step therefore  ( as a country) is to decide on what kind of outcome/output do we want at the end of the educational system, but first we ought to decide, what constitutes the end.

Is the end determined by a particular age, or is the ended considered to be at the secondary level?

If its at the secondary level then at what grade or sets of grades?

Given we have Technical High Schools, Regular High School, Secondary High Schools, Junior High School, the outcomes will be different, but there must be some minimal expectations for everyone who leaves this system at whatever age or grade or whatever criteria we choose to use at that stage.

I truly believe that we must move away from using final exam results in terms on number of subjects passed to determine success or failure of our students and the education system and instead move towards a tiered points system .

Education must be tailored towards teaching students the ability to think and not about passing exams. What is very clear to me is that attaining  12 subjects at grade one is not a testament to academic achievement and is not a measure of brilliance as many of us has been lead to believe.  This fallacy is being passed unto  too many of our students , who get the idea that they are “bright” and this is certainly not the case.

In fact many of these so called bright students fail at the tertiary level and a large percentage who make in through and graduate, are unable to translate their newly attained degree into making any fundamental and/or meaningful  improvements in the business they are employed to. They are not independent thinkers, they cannot work without supervision, they lack baisc skills to look at data, make analysis and develop plans to address the short coming identified.

If one should carefully look at what is taking place today and I spoke to this before, we have more persons today employed with Double first degrees, single and double masters and in some cases Phd’s,  but Jamaica’s economic performances has gotten worse every single year, why?

This to me is a clear indication that the current focus of the education system is deeply flawed and has to be totally redesigned.

The question is who is going to be doing this ?

While I dedicated most of my comments to education, its clear to everyone that education is only one of those measures used to determine the performance of the country and so let me once again just list a few other areas in which we are failing.

1. The justice system is failing
2. The health services is failing
3. National security system is failing
4. We are failing to prevent and solve crimes
5. We are failing in our competitiveness rating
6. We are failing on the transparency and corruption index.
7. We are failing in the manufacturing sector
8. We are failing in the agricultural sector, we cannot feed ourselves
9. We are failing in our productivity levels
10. We are failing to protect the weak and the poor
11. We are failing on almost every single economic performance index
12. We are failing in our social and ethical behaviour
13. We are failing even at failure.

The above my friends are symptomatic of a failed state and that is where we are today.

So any debate about any singular part of the system is an effort in futility and as such we need to focus on the larger picture and stop allowing those in the media and government to “pigeon hole ” us down a particular path to satisfy there own agenda’s.

Can we therefore have some serious discussion on why we are failing in most areas and what needs to be done to turn this situation around.