Latest update April 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
Sep 10, 2009 Editorial
It never makes for interesting reading when one hears of teachers having to take some form of industrial action to enforce the regulations of a school. In the first instance, parents who have children at the school are left to worry about the education of their children. In the second case, the reason often exposes people to critical shortcomings in the system.
This has happened on many occasions so industrial action by teachers is nothing new. However, it should not happen. It suggests that there is a breakdown in communication between the Education Ministry and the school. There have been occasions when teachers attached to more than one school had to resort to industrial action to force the Ministry to acknowledge some problem or the other. School has been reopened for just over one week and already three schools have had to take industrial action. This suggests that there is no proper monitoring system on the part of the Ministry.
Something must be seriously wrong and one does not want to believe that the Ministry is shirking its responsibilities. Taxpayers pay hard earned money to ensure that the system works and anyone who collects money must work for that money. If the taxpayer refuses to pay he is faced, automatically, with the full force of the law. People have lost almost all their worldly possessions for failing to comply with this basic law in the country.
Last week two schools could not open their doors because of the insanitary conditions. In one case the Ministry blamed the regional authorities. This suggested that the Ministry had put a system in place and someone shirked his/her responsibility. Two days ago, the teachers at one of the leading secondary schools refused to work because the Education Ministry failed to recognize a basic rule that operates in all schools, including some private schools that are serious about the education of children having taken people’s hard earned dollars to provide such.
When a child fails for two consecutive years, that child must leave the school. The failure suggests that the child simply cannot cope and should be placed in some other educational institution where the going might be less strenuous. This has been the case for decades.
When this happens at one of the leading secondary schools one is left to wonder how it is that the child gained entry to that institution in the first place. It surely cannot be that the school encouraged that child to lapse into obscurity having accepted a child that apparently showed promise of being a national leader or a serious contributor to national development at an early age.
The regulations are that the child should leave. There should be no query or appeals. The very regulations allow for a child to be promoted to a higher secondary school if he or she performs beyond expectations at the school he or she attends. It does not make sense that the Education Ministry should insist that the child continue in the school if after two years that child cannot cope with the basic work. At Bishops’ High School the Ministry did just that, much to the annoyance of the teachers there.
Did a parent use political affiliation to influence the decision of the Ministry? If this is the case then one must now wonder whether similar actions at the political level have influenced other decisions at schools.
In this case one must also wonder at the relationship between the parent and the school. If the parent was in tune with the child’s performance during the terms, that parent would have seen the weakness. Surely this was not the case. Communication between the school and the parent would have also exposed the weakness in the child, especially if the parent was attending parent-teacher association meetings. Two years is a long time.
But here we have the disgusting situation of the Ministry insisting that the child return to the school for the third year in the fourth form. Here one would have a sixteen or seventeen-year-old sitting among thirteen and fourteen-year-olds, disrupting their attempts at learning.
We learn that the aberrant child refused to show any inclination at learning, choosing instead to do a host of disruptive things. The parents, for their part, were content to bask in the pseudo prestige of having a child attend a leading school—merely attending.
There must be an investigation into the source of the order to have the child continue and disciplinary action should be taken against the source of the order. Already discipline is heading south because of a ruling by the Education Ministry. Academic performances should not be allowed to head in a similar direction.
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