Ronald Thwaites | Choices have consequences

The Minister is right. Each local school board has the practical and legal responsibility to determine how and when to resume school after Melissa.The role of government is to harvest the most urgent needs of each institution and to respond to them fairly and promptly. The religious communion of which I am part is doing just that for our more than one hundred schools. How soon will government cash be available to match private gifts?

When you insist on controlling all resources, total responsibility for efficient and transparent delivery follow. No excuses. Power sharing is the new name for peace across the globe. Clearly, our rulers don’t check for that.

People in distress need partnership and trust– not edicts from bushas and demands for ID and TRN cards before getting a case of water or TCC’s before you can land a relief shipment.

GETTING OUT OF OUR OWN WAY

Those least affected must help out those more severely compromised. Consider the problem of several schools. Parents who followed government’s cruel folly and have refused to contribute to their school are now finding that their children’s’ institutions of learning can’t reopen quickly. Who suffers?

I know of an excellent primary school to which public servants flock, which is scratching for relief funds now because so many of those same parents refused to pay the absolutely needed auxiliary fee of $20,000 a year for quality education, for which they would have had to fork out over $400,000 annually at a private school.

But check out their hairstyles, criss cars and the afforded trips to Disney. We have our priorities wrong. Many of us, led by the State apparatus spend on the wrong things. Miss Melissa mek story come to bump now. Are we prepared to promote and adopt a more modest and focused lifestyle where public funds and private philanthropy are devoted to those who are in real need while the rest of us shed our sense of entitlement and reliance on false promises?

GET THINGS STARTED

The Gleaner is right too, in its noticeably frequent emphasis on education reconstruction, that getting our children back to effective learning cannot be a secondary priority of post-hurricane activity.

Churches!

Rebuild and reorient your schoolrooms before the sanctuaries. Enduring a bumpy road to a good school is much more important than driving on a “cyarpet” to a physically and academically inadequate place of learning .

I feel sure that despite their own stress and damage, all teachers worthy of the profession would distance themselves from the unhelpful whinging of their trade union. What do they want for their own children, let alone ours? Please don’t demean your vocation by talking about on-line learning. That was a flop even when more of us had electricity, data and connectivity. The nation is reaping the failure of that expedient even now.

If teaching and learning time is lost for whatever reasons, including teacher trauma, the obvious recourse is to extend the school year to make up. The prescribed 190 days of school interface is insufficient anyway and is diluted by all sorts of stratagems. The dire emergency of these post-hurricane times should impel us to make better choices.

This newspaper ambitiously advocates for one-third of recovery investment to be reserved not only for rebuilding but transforming the education system. The important areas of literacy and numeracy are to be emphasised and the scourge of automatic promotion discontinued.

All good, but with one crucial omission. Discipline and wholesome value formation are fundamental to all positive personal outcomes and to societal good. Summer 2026 and succeeding long holidays can no longer be wasted. Programs of teacher retraining and student character development have to be mandatory The infection of social media addiction has to be confronted. Equally so the seduction of AI as a facilitator and not a substitute for learning. Basics like civility, silence and obedience, absent in many classrooms, demand emphasis.

From now, the universities and all devoted to the nation’s recovery should be promoting a serious re-look at the too hastily introduced National Standards Curriculum which is clearly not fit for purpose for the majority of students. I have been observing the futile effort to teach Spanish grammar to people who have no mastery of English grammar and whose native Jamaican Creole is suppressed.

DIFFERENT LIFESTYLES

Advancing education transformation in this post-Melissa period is part of a more comprehensive reorientation of lifestyle standards which physical and economic destruction is making unpostponable. It will take at least five years for all but the top one per cent of Jamaicans to recover their pre-Melissa spending power. Public choices can advance or delay the process.

Take the present confusion regarding the authority for roads between the municipal corporations and the National Works Agency. Who for example is responsible for the gross breaches of building standards on the Newcastle road in St.Andrew which prevents resumption of normal life and commerce and will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to repair, all of which could have been avoided.? Also check out O. Dave Allen’s graphic account of the destruction in Catherine Hall and its environs by faulty planning and rash execution.

WHOSE FAULT?

Can we face up to the truth that it’s not all Melissa’s fault. Our poor economic and cultural policies and practices have deepened our predicament.

The increasing emotional toll , foreign exchange waste and loss of productivity caused by more than a million motor vehicles now on limited roadways reflects shallow choices.

More cars come at the expense of a sliding dollar. The smart phone in every child’s hand has advantages but not when it replaces a book and exposes them to poisonous content which warps their social and spiritual perspectives.

When you lose half of your nation’s GDP in a week, the recourse is either a mad scramble to grab or consensual policies promoting a more inclusive, modest lifestyle in which all of us, not just the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all minority, feel they have a stake.

Which will we choose?

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com