Education, failed culture and inspiration
thenassauguardian editorial
It was important that Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham took time to greet 12-year-old Anna Albury outside of the House of Assembly. The girl, who is blind, was crowned Primary School Student of the Year over 115 candidates from around the country.
“I am like just any other child. I do not look at myself as having a disability. I just happen to be blind,” said the sixth grader from Hope Town School on receiving the award.
Fully blind from birth, Anna could have been placed in the School for the Blind, but her parents, Theresa and Lambert Albury insisted that she be raised normally with other children. They wanted her to do well.
With their encouragement and the support of her teachers and classmates, Anna has maintained an outstanding 3.8 cumulative grade point average.
Here in New Providence in our public school system many children with two working eyes, two working ears, two working legs and two working arms are not doing nearly as well as Anna. And they benefit from a free education through grade 12.
The national D average in the Bahamas General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE) exams masks the tremendous lack of achievement in our public school system. If the private schools are taken out of that calculation, our public school system would be in the F average range. No nation can be great with that level of underachievement.
Many blame the government of the day and the education bureaucracy for not doing more to reform the public education system. Certainly, there is more that can be done on the policy and funding sides of the equation to reform our system. However, a major part of the education problem in this country is our culture. Governments and civil servants cannot make Bahamian parents and guardians care about education.
Too many parents do not demand enough from their children. Too many Bahamians simply do not value the free education that is offered.
Concerned parents, relatives and guardians are crucial catalysts to success when it comes to educational achievement. When families care about education and hold children to standards, those children do better. When families only care about proms and making sure children are dressed in the trendiest clothes at the beginning of the school year, those children do not do as well.
Our culture has assumed too much of the foolish commercial nonsense from the two cultural centers we are between the United States and Jamaica. Knowledge of the latest rap or dancehall song is high, while the literacy and numeracy levels are low in The Bahamas.
We must do better.
Education is not merely about being prepared for the job market. It is about being a reasoned human being able to understand and function independently in the community you live in. It is also about being able to participate in the development and governance of that society in many different ways.
Too many Bahamians are too comfortable being uneducated. Too many Bahamians are too comfortable raising uneducated children. This must change.
What is especially problematic about this situation is that the free education system through grade 12 was something that was fought for.
The first black government of The Bahamas in 1967 had as its mandate ensuring that all Bahamians had access to education. In the ensuing decades schools were built across the country. Now, 44 years later, many of the parents and children who are the heirs to that movement show little interest in knowledge, learning and achievement.
Ignorant people are always ruled by smarter people. A people cannot be independent if they are dumb.
Bahamians must stop making excuses when it comes to learning and achievement. Yes, education reform is needed. But what is equally needed is concern about learning and knowledge by our people. A father who is not smart should, and can, have as a goal ensuring that his children do better than he did.
He can ensure that his children behave in school and do the work assigned; he can participate in the school’s Parent Teacher Association; he can seek tutoring for his children to ensure they have the technical assistance he cannot provide.
Anna Albury, a blind girl from a small school in the Family Islands, is doing well. She is inspirational. Born with a disadvantage, she still excels.
Mothers, fathers, relatives and guardians across The Bahamas must do more to ensure that their well-bodied children do better and take advantage of the opportunities given to them. We must care more about education and learning to ensure that we, Bahamians, have the capacity to govern ourselves and to command every sector of our economy.
Jul 30, 2011
thenassauguardian editorial
A political blog about Bahamian politics in The Bahamas, Bahamian Politicans - and the entire Bahamas political lot. Bahamian Blogger Dennis Dames keeps you updated on the political news and views throughout the islands of The Bahamas without fear or favor. Bahamian Politicians and the Bahamian Political Arena: Updates one Post at a time on Bahamas Politics and Bahamas Politicans; and their local, regional and international policies and perspectives.
Showing posts with label public education system Bahamas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public education system Bahamas. Show all posts
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Our education system is failing... It is particularly failing our boys
Education system failing our boys
thenassauguardian editorial
Last week new College of The Bahamas (COB) President Dr. Betsy Vogel-Boze told the Zonta Club that only 14 percent of COB graduates are male.
“It is not a problem that happens once they get to us. They are not graduating at the same rates, they are not applying for college at the same rates and that gap continues to widen,” she said.
The newly-landed foreign head of COB is right. Each year the results of the Bahamas General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE) reveal the problem with boys in the education system.
In 2010, girls received 16,233 grades; boys received 10,683 grades. Boys are only receiving 39.7 percent of the grades issued at the senior exams.
The boys receive fewer grades because fewer of them are there at graduation. Our boys are dropping out in large numbers.
What is even sadder is that the boys who stay in school long enough to do their final exams are doing poorly.
For A through C grades at the 2010 BGCSE’s, girls received about double the number of these grades than boys. However, as you move down the grade spectrum, grades D to U, the fewer boys in the system nearly match the girls in poor performance – 554 girls received the U grade and 448 boys did the same.
Our education system is failing. It is particularly failing our boys.
There is without question a correlation between education systems that fail boys and high crime rates. Young men unable to function in a modern economy will not simple sit down and starve to death.
The Bahamas has set three homicide records in four years and it is on pace to shatter last years dubious record. Police have also been battling a surge in recent years in armed robberies and property crimes such as house-breaking.
Our crisis is not just a crime crisis. It is a crisis of integrating young men into the legal economy and into civil society. A national effort is required to help our boys. One part of the strategy to help them may be to separate the genders in the public education system.
Environments need to be created helping young men, collectively, to equate masculinity with honest work, achievement and struggle. As we fail our boys in the current education system they go off into the underworld economy of drugs and violence.
The reformatory schools also need to be expanded. Those who cannot behave should not be allowed to remain in regular schools disrupting the peace. Those parents who cannot, or do not wish to, control their disruptive children should lose custody of those children to the state.
Just as the reformatory schools would exist for the disruptive, a new juvenile prison is needed at Her Majesty’s Prisons. This would be different from the reformatory schools, which would be schools for troubled children. Juvenile jail would be jail for young criminals.
These few suggestions should be a part of a wider national discussion on the failing Bahamian boy and man. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on education in The Bahamas and we have the problems we have. Simply throwing more money at the education system is not necessarily the solution.
There was a time a few decades ago when women were discriminated against in the workplace and by law. We fortunately have evolved beyond those times. Today, however, as women rise and take on leadership positions in the country, men are falling.
The 14 percent figure at COB is dangerous. If we cannot reach our boys and encourage them to embrace education, more and more of them will be before our courts lost, confused and charged with all manner of violent offenses.
3/28/2011
thenassauguardian editorial
thenassauguardian editorial
Last week new College of The Bahamas (COB) President Dr. Betsy Vogel-Boze told the Zonta Club that only 14 percent of COB graduates are male.
“It is not a problem that happens once they get to us. They are not graduating at the same rates, they are not applying for college at the same rates and that gap continues to widen,” she said.
The newly-landed foreign head of COB is right. Each year the results of the Bahamas General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE) reveal the problem with boys in the education system.
In 2010, girls received 16,233 grades; boys received 10,683 grades. Boys are only receiving 39.7 percent of the grades issued at the senior exams.
The boys receive fewer grades because fewer of them are there at graduation. Our boys are dropping out in large numbers.
What is even sadder is that the boys who stay in school long enough to do their final exams are doing poorly.
For A through C grades at the 2010 BGCSE’s, girls received about double the number of these grades than boys. However, as you move down the grade spectrum, grades D to U, the fewer boys in the system nearly match the girls in poor performance – 554 girls received the U grade and 448 boys did the same.
Our education system is failing. It is particularly failing our boys.
There is without question a correlation between education systems that fail boys and high crime rates. Young men unable to function in a modern economy will not simple sit down and starve to death.
The Bahamas has set three homicide records in four years and it is on pace to shatter last years dubious record. Police have also been battling a surge in recent years in armed robberies and property crimes such as house-breaking.
Our crisis is not just a crime crisis. It is a crisis of integrating young men into the legal economy and into civil society. A national effort is required to help our boys. One part of the strategy to help them may be to separate the genders in the public education system.
Environments need to be created helping young men, collectively, to equate masculinity with honest work, achievement and struggle. As we fail our boys in the current education system they go off into the underworld economy of drugs and violence.
The reformatory schools also need to be expanded. Those who cannot behave should not be allowed to remain in regular schools disrupting the peace. Those parents who cannot, or do not wish to, control their disruptive children should lose custody of those children to the state.
Just as the reformatory schools would exist for the disruptive, a new juvenile prison is needed at Her Majesty’s Prisons. This would be different from the reformatory schools, which would be schools for troubled children. Juvenile jail would be jail for young criminals.
These few suggestions should be a part of a wider national discussion on the failing Bahamian boy and man. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on education in The Bahamas and we have the problems we have. Simply throwing more money at the education system is not necessarily the solution.
There was a time a few decades ago when women were discriminated against in the workplace and by law. We fortunately have evolved beyond those times. Today, however, as women rise and take on leadership positions in the country, men are falling.
The 14 percent figure at COB is dangerous. If we cannot reach our boys and encourage them to embrace education, more and more of them will be before our courts lost, confused and charged with all manner of violent offenses.
3/28/2011
thenassauguardian editorial
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