Cabinet's decision on Thursday to approve the expenditure of $90.7 million over three years to hire 500 specialised staff to address behavioural issues among schoolchildren is a step in the right direction and is long overdue.
Education Minister Tim Gopeesingh's announcement of the decision to recruit clinical psychologists and to add to the ministry's existing social workers and student counsellors is a welcome attempt by the educational authorities to deal with the many students who enter primary schools with deep emotional issues, learning disabilities or vision and hearing problems.
If the expenditure of $30 million a year for three years helps schools make early diagnoses of behavioural and psychological problems, followed by quick and decisive interventions to resolve or treat those problems, it will be money well spent.At another level, the recruitment of trained professionals has the ability to improve the pedagogical environment within the school system as it's long been known that not everyone can learn in the same way or at the same pace.
As a result of limited staff, lack of facilities, diagnostic capability, specialist teachers and equipment, schools in T&T have had to adopt an approach to education in which knowledge is transmitted in a one-syllabus-fits-all manner.
The Government now appears to be taking a holistic approach in providing specialists and facilities to deal with a wide range of handicaps and psychological issues. Some of those regarded as problem children are not unwilling to learn, but unable to do so by conventional methods, and some of the behavioural issues they present arise from this underlying issue.
Hopefully, the infusion of new professionals into the school system will also lead to greater attention being placed on the needs of the individual student, so that each child who enters the formal school system will be able to live up to his or her fullest potential–whether that potential is to be a scientist, a programmer, a welder or a journalist.
Catering for all of these issues and addressing the challenges should make learning a more pleasant experience for these and other children and may also resolve or reduce other challenges faced by the education system.But underlying Dr Gopeesingh's concern about the need to improve the diagnostic and counselling abilities of the Ministry of Education's student support services must be the clear link between educational failure and the growth of criminal gangs in high-crime areas.
These gangs recruit troubled teenagers–who may have been suspended, expelled or flunked out of the school system–into a life of crime.The upsurge in crime and especially in murder in the two decades or so is a function of the failure of the education system to address the emotional, psychological, behavioural and ethical needs of children–and sometimes of their parents.
In a real sense, then, the $90 million that the Government is spending may avoid the expenditure of $900 million on new prison facilities in the next five years or may cause a reduction in the $9 billion that the Government will spend on security and law enforcement in the next two years.