THE EDITOR: The Ministry of Education is unable to transform our education system. The National Consultation Education Policy Draft concept notes prove that the ministry is not guided by any coherent concept or philosophy of education, save and except for its touted claim to monitor schools and teachers so as to account for student achievement.
The ministry has missed the irony that it has not followed through on its clearly stated position in the 2013 national primary school curriculum that it must be implemented via a thematic and multidisciplinary approach. Yet to this day it has not offered a single defensible thematic unit that would clearly lead to the '21st century skills' it enumerated, and in 2022 it parrots the same list of stand-alone traditional subjects that it banks upon.
A ministry that is unwilling and unable to engage in the necessary self-critical reflection on its fatal flaws has no moral authority to lead any transformation.
So, our Prime Minister must intervene (as Dr Eric Williams intervened in 1975 with his Cabinet Note on the senior comprehensive school system).
A ministry of national service must be the counterbalance, at least in the short term. There are tens of thousands of primary school pupils, from infants to Standard Four, who have been almost fatally impacted by their absence from face-to-face schooling and their very spotty exposure to any meaningful online learning.
The ministry officials and technocrats wait in their offices to monitor reports from school officials while these increasingly marginalised pupils will soon morph into forces that undermine the status quo in our primary schools.
Thankfully, there are thousands of UTT graduates in communities throughout our nation who studied education for four years and are now able to prove their mettle as professionals by serving as learning support personnel and research participants who can implement thematic interdisciplinary projects with groups of pupils (online and face-to-face) and record the case studies of the learning experiences of these groups of pupils as they engage in the projects to directly meet the 21st century skills that the 2013 curriculum mandates - and that the existing primary school system steadfastly ignores. (They prefer to drill and practice for SEA.)
It is in these circumstances that we need those 'highly qualified PhDs and Masters' that Horace 'Chalkdust' Liverpool referred to, not as the concept note offers, to 'maintain easy rapport by ensuring teachers are assigned to classes for more than an academic year. For example, Infants 1 and 2, Standards 1 and 2, or Standards 3 to 5.'
If this suggestion seems to promote two conflicting concurrent types of school experiences, you are right. It reflects the reality of the official and hidden curriculum, and makes provision for and legitimises what the present ideal (that all schools must be 'prestige' schools) holds out as an abomination.
In a ministry of national service the professional teacher (freed from the limiting restrictions of
