WE NEED AN EDUCATIONAL RETHINK
by Andre Moses
As a parent I understand the joy of fulfilment felt by parents and children as they celebrate SEA results. Preparing for the SEA involves a whole family effort and when that hard work is rewarded everyone shares in the euphoria of the achievement. As a parent and a career teacher, it also pains me when we implicitly or explicitly make SEA results a dividing line that categorizes children who are at the very beginning of their life’s journey.
For thirty-five years I worked as a secondary school teacher and had the opportunity to perform various roles from subject teacher to Head of Department, to Vice Principal, to Principal. Outside the classroom, I spent thirty (30) rewarding years as the teacher in charge of the school steelband and ten (10) years working with the St. Augustine Secondary football program.
Over that period, I had the pleasure and privilege to tutor, mentor, observe, learn from, love, and be inspired by countless students and past students.
Some were brilliant in the classroom, some were creative, some were charismatic, some were leaders, some were determined, courageous and/or gifted. Others were timid, lacked self-confidence, made mistakes, or struggled to find their calling. As teachers were not called upon to love them because they were ‘bright’ or ‘successful’, but rather because they were children whose potential, we were charged with the responsibility to discover, nurture, and facilitate.
Howard Gardiner wrote his revolutionary educational thesis ‘Multiple Intelligences’ in 1983. It was certainly no condescension to people ‘who are good with their hands’, it significantly broadened the concept of intelligence to include intelligences like Messi’s magic on the football field, Boogsie’s steelpan genius, Martin Luther King’s eloquent civil rights advocacy and Peter Minshall’s globally acclaimed Carnival Performance Art.
As we celebrate fifty-nine (59) years as an independent nation, our mandate must not simply be to ask questions, but also to find and implement solutions. Education therefore should focus on equipping our next generation of leaders with problem-solving skills, rather than inadvertently reinforcing concepts about ‘good’ and ‘not-so-good’ schools.
I have always agonized with examinations that evaluate candidates based on what they Do-Not know, but neglect to properly credit candidates for the knowledge and skills that they Do possess. How different it would be if after primary school our technology minded youngsters could be redirected to programs in animation, gaming, robotics, and the production of Apps.
If our next Dwight Yorkes, Kelvin Molinos, Nicholas Pauls and Richard Thompsons could be redirected to sport academies, and our budding musicians to music schools. So too our budding scientists and engineers be redirected to programs that identify and problem solve national concerns such as immunization, flooding, solar energy and building construction in this era of climate change and pandemics. Of course, all such programs would have an embedded General Education component with related courses in Math, English, Civics and Trinidad and Tobago History.
Think of how different it would be if the Minister of Education visited a different set of schools each time, not to celebrate a ‘minority’ of the highest achievers, but to welcome the nation’s newest cohort of problem solvers to exciting new journeys in alignment with their multiple intelligence(s). Think of the impact such a recognition of our children’s gifts and the resultant positivity will have on filling the current vacuum that unfortunately and unapologetically posits crime as a binary alternative to the active engagement of our youth.
No parent consciously celebrates one child in a way that excludes another child, and neither should Trinidad and Tobago. To do so would be to neglect to ‘see’ and ‘nurture’ the innate gifts with which all God’s children, without exception, are endowed. Surely an Education System that is selective in its celebration has more to do with its narrow focus than with any real inabilities of our youth, who are all born with multiple talents etched into their DNA.