THE January 29 sitting of the Social Services and Public Administration Joint Select Committee (JSC) of Parliament broached an interesting, if not controversial, issue of extra lessons that has become an integral component of our primary education landscape.
While strong and emotional sentiments were expressed during the sitting regarding the ethical conduct of teachers, unfortunately the discussion seemingly failed to address the root cause of the problem it identified.
A dispassionate treatise of the issue should, of necessity, seek to understand how the issue of extra lessons emerged to become so deeply embedded in the primary education narrative.
Education experts and commentators have repeatedly indicated that the primary school curriculum is overloaded. This overload is primarily driven by an unnecessary high-stakes examination that culminates a child's tenure at primary school.
Over the years, there have been many calls for this arrangement to be dismantled, owing to the many negative outcomes it imposes on the education system. However, this antiquated colonial arrangement still persists, owing to the lack of political will on the part of leaders to address a system that perpetuates inequity, much to the detriment of the society.
It is a known fact that many parents, teachers and students are highly stressed in preparation for the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA), and its usefulness has been consistently questioned by a wide cross-section of society.
Teachers, driven by pressure from the Ministry of Education to ensure their schools are classified as high-performing, are tasked with pulling out all the stops to not just complete the SEA syllabus, but to ensure that as many of their students score in the eighties and nineties so that their beloved charges can access a handful of places in our unofficial prestige schools listing.
This pressure on teachers is further compounded by parents who perceive SEA as the most important examination in the lives of their children simply because it has become a competition to secure a prized place in a select group of secondary schools.
This is the root of the problem, and it was rather unfortunate that in all the enthusiastic discussion that ensued in the JSC hearing, this fundamental point was not even mentioned.
No school curriculum, especially at the primary level, should require such an extensive quantum of extra time for curriculum objectives to be met. This should have been the first detached observation by anyone weighing in on the issue, considering how perversive the issue of extra lessons has become.
That is the first indicator that the SEA curriculum is overloaded and skewed away from fundamental principles of sound and responsible education. Fundamentally, SEA has absolutely nothing to do with issues of validity and reliability or learning objectives and outcomes. This situation is an exercise in examination drilling and rote learning.
Far from being an assessment exercise, it is an evaluation ritual that has been precipi
