JAMAICA – Last week, Mrs Fayval Williams, the minister of education, told the nation that her reports indicate a resumption of the pre-COVID-19 average school attendance of 75 per cent of students. That is appalling. It means that upwards of 100,000 children and young people are absent on any given day. For me, that is enough cause for a state of emergency different from the one wished for by this Government.
Section 20 et seq of the Education Act provides the authority to declare truancy zones and require compulsory school attendance. We need to invoke this measure now. That’s if we are more than ‘mouth-water’ serious about suppressing crime, achieving economic growth and levity for all.
In a dysfunctional Education system in which more than 70 per cent of graduates fail to matriculate, frustration and anger are the outcomes. If the oppressive social system cannot be pulled down and the education system cannot be pulled up; if the economy is shackled by limited opportunities for producing legitimate wealth and the disrespected masses have ladders that are too short to scale the walls of deprivation, then the inevitable recourse is the illegal routes of illegitimate pursuits: crime and drugs. Check the corners in inner- city communities and the shop steps in rural areas and the ‘wutless boys’ and ‘careless girls’ will be found, because we put them there.”
What has changed fundamentally since Edward Seaga offered this undeniable analysis? And if one-quarter of the nation’s youth are missing school chronically, what different outcomes do we expect nowadays? Add to the absenteeism the watered-down Caribbean Examinations Council tests, the expensive pretence of ‘graduations’ (for which one loan shark company says parents can borrow $150,000 easy, easy – at 49 per cent interest!) and then a two-month-long holiday on the heels of a two-year-long lockdown. Madness!
A sliver of good news is the announcement of a grade-three diagnostic test in literacy and numeracy to be administered in June. If this is done honestly, the results will constitute a formidable database for remediation.
But an immediate shudder of fear. What are we going to do with the predictably dismal outcomes? Will we follow the usual dead-end, delusionary practice and find a way to say how good things are after all?
Getting everyone back into the classrooms is more important than NIDS right now. Nationwide truancy zones are appropriate. Six weeks of summer school ought to be mandatory this year. Anything less is irresponsible and a contempt for the searing truth of Mr Seaga’s words quoted above. Why is there so little respect for his principles by those who sing his praises?
A report from the respected Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) says that trust between persons, and citizens towards government, “is the most pressing and yet least discussed problem confronting Latin America and the Caribbean” because “trust is lower in the region than anywhere else in the world”.
The IDB defines trust as the belief that others will not act opportunistically. Low trust between persons breeds capricious behaviour, betrays the integrity of intimate relationships, and fosters informality of every stripe. At the state level, growth is retarded, democracy is undermined, and coercion becomes normative.
So how do we engender trusting interactions in this 60th Independence anniversary? Where is it taught and incentivized? Who is trusted anyway?
Clearly, the Government, the security forces and many other vital institutions suffer a deficit of trust. Political parties are frantic to confuse the adulation of the faithful as evidence of trust. Opportunism, which is the equally ugly twin of selfishness, is the germ of all that is holding us back.
Trust is faith in others – in their honesty, dependability and goodwill. What is the common cause which is compelling enough to elicit faithful, cooperative responses – trusting behaviour – among Jamaicans? In the couple of months till August ‘mawnin’, how to build trust should be the main theme of national discourse and action.
Without that, it is all fizz, charade and bellyful of gas. Just like pretending we’re making progress in education and national security, when at least 25 per cent of schoolers are absent.
