Coincidentally, while taking my daughter to school the other morning I heard radio hosts wishing luck to the unfortunate children in the final stages of head butting, hair-pulling and bush-baths to take the SEA tomorrow. I expect, inevitably, after the SEA results, the Minister of Education will trot out the top performers and proclaim their success, and by extension the success of the system.
The traumatised tykes, in turn, will praise, first, God, then parents, teachers, and the People's Partnership government. Then they'll proceed to the schools of their choice, the convents and colleges and what have you, and, well, you can guess the rest. (Careers in law, medicine, accountancy, politics, followed by lawsuits, protests of malfeasance and angry retorts about brain drain, then silence but for the sound of money flowing.)
But what about the other 90 per cent (or so) who do not manage to get into the colleges and convents? A related fate; they'll be the ones screaming and filing the lawsuits against the doctors, lawyers, and general malfeasance of the successful ten per cent.
It all starts in the schools the 90 per cent go to; what used to be the Junior Sec system. It's ostensibly no more, but this is, unfortunately, not quite true. The spirit of the Junior Sec lives on in the many re-named and de-shifted schools. Certainly, some non-traditional (let's call them) high schools manage to do pretty well, and produce success stories. But those success stories are outweighed by the horror stories of violence and rampant illiteracy.
The mass, as far as I know, have remained true to the stereotype. From there come the many videos of Trini schoolfights, school-sex, and other crunchy extra-curriculars. The problems, unfortunately, stem from the schools' failure to tackle their core function, the whole reading and writing business. I would love to be more specific about this, but unfortunately, I can't.
The latest statistics on school literacy I have are the ALTA and UWI numbers from about 20 years ago, when separate surveys showed a local literacy rate below 50 per cent. That is, less than half the population was able to read well enough to make sense of a newspaper. (That explains a whole lot about the comments you see below some articles. Unfortunately, the survey didn't test the literacy of journalists and columnists who produce some of the newspaper articles.)
To get updated statistics, I called Paula Lucie Smith of the Adult Literacy Tutors Association (ALTA). She told me there are no more recent statistics, and a dearth of statistics on the subject generally. She suspects this is because the truth is politically toxic. The Dyslexia Association also had no specific numbers for T&T, but said, in general, between ten and 20 per cent of the population was dyslexic. And this is just one disorder. There are others which afflict the school population.
Miraculously, the education ministry's Web site contains a report of a consultation on special needs education held last week (April 29). It presented the fact that 6,000 students had been diagnosed with a variety of learning disabilities, out of the 18,000 in Infant and Year One students who had been screened. There remain 126,000 more students to be screened. If this percentage is reflective of the whole, it means 30 per cent of the school population has some form of learning disability.
The ministry might have literally just discovered this last week, but ALTA and other organisations have known for years. ALTA tried to intervene, running pilot programmes at the invitation of several secondary schools, but all were shut down by the Ministry. In 2011 ALTA had great plans to take literacy programmes into secondary schools. Proposals were made to the government to introduce the ALTA programme for low-performing students just leaving primary and going to high school.
Ms Lucie-Smith said the government ignored them, and ALTA abandoned the idea. She also said going into schools was rife with other problems, mainly behavioural. "When students can't cope, they do one of two things," she said. "They either disappear or disrupt." Those who disrupt are very effective in making the whole system dysfunctional.
This much I've heard from teachers in the school system. I was also told by someone who asked they not be identified that you can predict from Forms One�Three reading scores who's going to end up in jail. (I could find no figures as to the literacy of the prison population. Or the Protective Services, for that matter.)
In the midst of all this chaos is the vortex of the SEA examination, which harms much more than it helps. Ms Lucie Smith echoes what many educators and close observers know: the Trinidadian school system is designed for children with a natural aptitude for reading and writing (about ten per cent of the population) and leaves the rest to catch as can. She said from as early as two and three in pre-school, children are pushed into reading, which is not always the best strategy and does not suit every student. From this early on, students fall out, and never catch up.
Perhaps the honourable Minister of Education might consider doing something useful for a change. Instead of wasting time on the ten per cent of the student population who do not need help, and will succeed anyway, perhaps it might make more sense to focus on the 90 per cent who can, with a change of strategy, and modifications to the system, become functional.
But sense and politics are often not compatible, so off to SEA the kiddies go, where 90 per cent of them will drown.