Education and the World Bank report

by RALPH JEMMOTT IN AN AGE when everything appears to be in a state of turmoil, it is easy to describe most aspects of life as being “in crisis.” The recent World Bank Report has described Caribbean education in just such terms, in “a state of crisis.”

World Bank country director for the Caribbean Lilia Burunciuc has concluded: “This is not just an educational crisis, it is a crisis that threatens the future of the Caribbean.”

Among the systemic inadequacies outlined, the report lists the following: 1. Outdated teaching practices.

2. Ill-equipped physical and digital infrastructure.

3. Widening education inequities.

4. Weak foundational skills in literacy, numeracy and critical thinking to “improve learning outcomes.”

5. Rigid curricula that do not meet the needs of 21st century learners.

The interaction between teacher and student in the rectangular area called the classroom is central in determining learning outcomes. Anything that conduces to an improvement of outcomes is good. Those factors that do not so conduce are bad and a hindrance to learning on both the cognitive and affective levels. The problem with formal schooling today is that there is an increasing array of negatives that run interference with the positives that schools are seeking to achieve.

In the Caribbean these negatives would include growing material poverty within the underclass, social decay, indiscipline and disorders that teachers are struggling to confront but find themselves ill-equipped to handle. Today, there is too much in the wider culture, what the Greeks called the “paideia” that enculturates children to wrong ends.

Quality teachers

One result is a flight from a teaching profession that struggles to co-opt and retain the quality teachers needed to achieve the lofty objectives that educational reformers like Ellia Barunciuc and Victoria Levin imagine.

Levin is senior economist of the World Bank’s global practice. The World Bank Report observes that in the Caribbean there is a lack of professional standards for teacher recruitment and deployment.

The problem is that prospective teachers, males in particular, are increasingly disinclined to become career teachers. It concluded that “inexperience teachers are left struggling in the classroom and time is not used effectively.”

Levin notes that teachers often lack the support to adapt their instructional methods, incorporate social-emotional skills or assist students with special emotional needs. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that more and more children are coming to schools with social and emotional deficits.

Time is not used effectively because teachers spend an inordinate amount of time trying to effect control. Effective teaching requires some measure of classroom discipline. It only takes one child to disrupt a classroom. In the Caribbean it is still possible to enter a classroom as a teacher without an iota of teaching education or experience.

This is less so than before, but it still happens as schools are sometimes forced the hire whoever they can get.

The World Bank Report highlights two other very pertinent concerns.

One is what the document calls, “the highly stratified secondary system and entrenched inequalities.” Barbados still has a very hierarchical, selective secondary structure. Ask any Bajan the pecking order and you will see a coincidence of choice. Selectivity is one of the most controversial aspects of educational theory and practice.

It also often gives rise to the most appalling social hypocrisy as limousine liberals and “haute-bourgeois Marxist” espouse egalitarianism while sending their own children to the so-called better schools. The issue is well and objectively examined in Philip H.

Coombs’ The World Educational Crisis: A Systems Analysis. The idea that selective schooling of and by itself condemns some students to failure is pontifical nonsense. But a lot depends on what bourgeois society considers success.

It is a consideration defined largely by material possession and status enhancement. One could tell stories of resounding successes and colossal failures coming out of the two schools at which I taught, Parkinson Memorial and Harrison College. One of the words most used in connection with the reform of the local educational system is “inclusivity.” It is more of a contrived political slogan than anything else. We are all in this together, we are told. Inclusivity is more a function of the economic and socio-cultural system than the education structure.

Formal schooling may mollify social distinction but it does alter structures or produce an all-embracing “inclusivity”; whatever that really means. As Orwell noted we are all equal, but some are more equal than others. We may seek inclusivity, but some will inevitably come to feel more included than others.

Another aspect of the World Bank report on the Caribbean concerns ill-equipped physical and digital infrastructure. One hopes that the Bank has a lot of capital to lend or “give away” when our leaderships come a’ begging.

Ralph Jemmott is a retired educator and social commentator. This article was submitted as a Letter to the Editor.

THE RECENT World Bank Report has described Caribbean education as in “a state of

crisis.” (GP)