Because of the nature of our school system, the main focus of primary school has become the SEA exam, with most parents wanting their child to pass for a ‘prestige school’. Children are subjected to a great deal of pressure from the time they start school. They must attend classes during what used to be holidays. Parents and children are under immense stress from day one!
One of the major issues with the SEA examination is the content of the material to be studied. During my 18 years of teaching Mathematics at the secondary school level, I had not encountered some of the Mathematical terms that ten and 11-year-olds were being forced to learn; I had to resort to the dictionary to find some of those definitions. I was also totally amazed to see that some of the topics that I was teaching students of Forms 1, 2 and 3 were also being taught at Standards 3, 4 and 5. This syllabus is much too onerous for little children’s brains.
My family and I looked at the Mathematics test papers in one of the newspapers recently; three doctors, an accountant and a teacher were challenged by the questions. There were so many things wrong with that test and I am sure all the actual tests must be very similar to this one. In most cases, the student first has to read some very convoluted sentences to try to determine what is being asked; it is at though the examiner is out to trick the student. Then, of course, he has to know advanced topics that he should not even be aware of. Why does a ten to 11-year-old have to know about the vertices of a triangular prism? Or the differences between mean, mode, and median? Why should he even know those terms? When my daughter was doing this exam, I learned mathematical terms like subtrahend and minuend–I had done a degree in Mathematics but I had never encountered those terms.
As a secondary school teacher, I often had to force students to ‘unlearn’ what they had supposedly learned in primary school; in primary school, it was all done by rote to pass the exam but with no understanding of what they were doing.
This could be one of the reasons for the high ‘dropout’ rate of children in our schools—the material is too onerous. More than that, it is particularly difficult for those children who have no one who can help them with their homework; such children will inevitably ‘fall through the cracks’. Could this have contributed to our high crime rate?
In many cases, a child is promoted from one class to a higher one simply because of age rather than because he/she has mastered the abilities required in that class. I recently met a ten-year-old who is in Standard Three but who cannot read a book that the average six-year-old can read. The immediate solution to this problem would be to have remedial classes for the children who are not doing as well as their peers.
It is my humble opinion that, in order to save our children, the SEA syllabus needs to be revised so that more children can achieve and acquire a feeling of self-worth.
If we go back to basics, more children would have a greater chance of success rather than frustration. We need to spend more time on learning how to read, to write and to spell, then the extras may be added. At least give ALL our children a chance.
A different type of reason for the large amount of children dropping out of school can be that they do not have enough money to pay for transportation. A better free public transport system should be developed especially for children in rural areas.
Incidentally, Carnival week absenteeism is not necessarily the fault of the parents. In the secondary school where I taught, I noticed a high level of absenteeism on Ash Wednesday; a few children also stay at home on the Thursday and Friday of Carnival week. Getting transportation to bring them to school on Ash Wednesday was most often cited as the reason for their absence; many of the taxi drivers choose not to work on those days, and therefore the children have no choice but to stay at home. Since some parents pay drivers by the week, they are reluctant to pay for the five days for Carnival week when there may be teaching for only two of those five days. The situation is even worse for those parents who are living on a very limited budget.
On a related note, I saw recently that someone was talking about doing away with the ‘prestige schools’ in order to level the playing field. It seems that his idea is to do away with what works in order to level the playing field. I should imagine that the better thing to do is to find out where the successes lie and to emulate those.
The above may be simplistic but, to date, none of the complex ideas have worked.
Jenny Singh
Valsayn Park