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Education
Reforms: Never
mind the local drum beating,
Mr
Minister
--
Paramanund Soobarah
Our
real foes are staring at us from abroad. They threaten our
economic survival. They are all out there in the world at
large; you must prepare the coming generation to face them.
Never mind the drum-beating by the so-called ‘national
press’ which is all out to direct the nation’s mind
inwards and turn the current debate on education into a
communal war: they seem to be tired of the peace we have all
enjoyed so far -- to the extent of wanting to provoke
communal rioting.
That
press has been comforted by the regrettable demise in police
custody of a crime suspect. Never mind the ‘community’
of the apparently extra-judicial killing victim: what is
comforting to them in this matter is that the
‘community’ of officer in charge of the Major Crime
Investigation Team (MCIT) is the same as that of Mr Dharam
Gokool, Minister of Education – that is to say, a
“community of killers”. In applying that epithet to the
Minister, that press is guilty of dishonesty, fabrication
and exaggeration. And in applying it to SP Radhoa, it shows
how choosy it is in applying standards: in some cases nobody
is guilty until so proven in a court of law, and in others a
person is immediately a murderer who must be lynched and
crucified right away even if he was not at the scene of the
crime: isn’t it enough that the crime was probably carried
out by applying his principles?
The
parliamentary and extra-parliamentary oppositions have also
been doing their bits. According to one daily, a prominent
politician has charged the MES with corruption; the
implication is that the examination results they produce
cannot be used for deciding the ability levels of students.
This shows the level of their desperation. The same daily
reported on an address by the head of a religious faith to
the teaching community; according to the report, he issued a
call to them for militant action and disobedience. We now
only need Mr Bin Laden to issue a fatwa against some aspect
or other of our teaching of Islamic studies and the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad to issue a call for non-cooperation because
Sanskrit is not being taught in our schools to bring the
education system and the country as a whole to a complete
halt. The public and the teaching community must remain on
their guard against such seditious brainwashing and not
allow themselves to be swayed by such patently poisonous
propaganda.
In
the case of the MCIT, justice must be allowed to take its
course without its being influenced by politicians or the
media; all who are guilty of reprehensible crimes, whoever
they are, must be identified and brought to justice; they
must include all who are guilty of as yet unresolved crimes
committed in recent times, including the high profile cases
like those of Vanessa Lagesse, Nadine Dantier and the Bassin
Blanc affair, as well as the death in police custody cases
including the sad Kaya affair; all these cases must be
investigated and the culprits brought to justice, with or
without the help of MCIT: this is a debt that the Prime
Minister owes to the nation. In this matter there can be no
question of “case filed”.
In
Education, the Minister’s plans to streamline our system
to prepare the citizens of the future to face the tough
competitive world that awaits them must be understood
properly and implemented enthusiastically by all concerned.
We are grateful to Le Matinal for bringing to the
attention of the public some elements of Minister Gokool’s
plans for educational reforms in their article entitled “A
case for education” in their issue of Tuesday 24 January
2006. This is the first time that many see any reference to
a ‘brochure’ of the ministry on the subject: some people
at the ministry have obviously not been doing their work.
The
Minister’s first steps have brought down on him the wrath
of the ‘national press’ and of those with vested
interests in the status quo. They assume that streaming will
show up systematic weaknesses in certain ethnic groups.
Assuming there is such systematic weakness (which I doubt
very much), leaving these children in mixed ability classes
will never permit any special attention to be given to them
to overcome whatever problems they may have. They will
remain hidden in the mixed ability classes until they
ultimately fail the School Certificate and become problems
for themselves, for their parents, and for society in
general. For their protection and in their own interests,
children with weaknesses must be identified at the earliest
possible stage to enable remedial action to be taken in
their favour. The streaming exercise must continue right
through the education system: it must neither begin nor end
with the CPE.
From
what we can gather Minister Dharam Gokool wants every child
in Mauritius to receive the best possible education that
develops their individual potentialities to the fullest
possible extent for their own benefit and for the benefit of
the community. Both weak and specially gifted children must
be identified as early as possible in a streaming exercise
and each group provided with adapted teaching.
In
the UK there are plans to group children into nine ability
bands, but we would not wish to go that far: the bulk of our
children must be classified as normal; about 4% of them
should be classified as gifted and sent to national schools;
and another 4% will have to be classified as weak and
provided with special treatment. They should replace the
group now labelled ZEP areas; the present system is
discriminatory in its application. Some streaming must still
take place within the middle 92%; regrettably some will fail
their CPE; the success of our education system must be
judged by reducing this proportion gradually to zero.
If
streaming were adopted next year as from Standard 4, and
specially adapted teaching were provided to both end groups,
the results of the 2009 CPE exam should prove the
superiority of the streaming system. The current year could
be taken to prepare staff for such teaching; those opting
for the weaker classes should be provided appropriate
financial incentives. But great vigilance will have
exercised against sabotage.
For
the record, the retrograde steps taken by the MMM-MSM
government has led to 40% of boys and 30% of girls failing
the 2005 CPE exams. In considering these figures, please
bear in mind that the MES allows children to get through in
language subjects if they pass the comprehension part only,
whether or not they pass the composition part: this was very
forcefully highlighted recently by Mr Dev Virahsawmy. In
fact, for the purpose of all discussion of performance at
national level, only the number of passes with a ‘C’ or
better should be taken into account. The MES website has
stopped showing the statistics of CPE results gradewise and
subjectwise. The last year for which such figures are
available is 2003. These figures show that in that year only
44.0% of candidates scored a ‘C’ or better in Maths, and
49.6% secured similar grades in English. Only in French did
the performance exceed 50%. This means that under their
watch, half the child population of the country remained
illiterate and innumerate. Had the results in subsequent
years been better, they would surely have been loudly
trumpeted. If this is not a disavowal of their system, what
is it then? Of course, their explanation is that the MES is
corrupt.
It
will take time to undo the damage done by the MMM-MSM in the
last five years. The 2005 CPE results come after not just
five but twenty years of the application of their education
policies. The 2005 School Certificate results, particularly
in English, Mathematics and the Sciences will in all
likelihood confirm the catastrophic trend set by their
ideologies. For any meaningful discussion of those results
only passes with a C or better should be taken into account.
The 2005 figures may show more bare passes than in previous
years but the acid test will be the number of passes with
C’s or better in five subjects including English.
A
public education system cannot attend to each child
individually for every single waking instant. Even parents,
should they decide to attend to the education of their
children personally, cannot give each child such attention.
Public education systems, by their very nature, are systems
of mass production. In such a system, it is not possible for
every ‘item’ to be ‘handmade’. For best results, the
‘raw material’ has to be organised and batched to
simplify processing. Hypocritical moralists may take
exception to this analogy, but to organisers, managers and
policy makers, schools are in effect factories that convert
their raw material (young children) into intermediate-level
products ready for the next stage of processing.
One
of the essential aspects of the organisation of the material
has to be what is known locally as streaming but is more
commonly known in the UK as ‘setting’, that is to say
organising children into sets of more or less equal ability.
Thus organised, they are much easier to ‘process’: each
set can be dispensed the resources and teaching methods most
appropriate to its needs. Weak children can be given special
attention in a timely manner. Prime Minister Tony Blair of
UK promised setting in schools in England way back in 1997,
but he has been held back by what we here call “la
base”. Tory Leader David Cameron has promised to extend
‘setting’ to all State schools if his party is returned
to power.
Setting,
or streaming, must take place within schools, within regions
(assuming they are honestly homogeneous, not the hodge-podge
concocted by Minister Steve Obeegadoo), and nationally, at
all levels of the primary and secondary education system.
Suitable stages for carrying out the exercise are at the
ends of Standard 3 (regionally), standard 6 (CPE, regionally
and nationally), Form III (nationally) and Form V
(nationally).
Under
the plans announced, all regional secondary schools will be
Forms I-VI schools. I have no doubt in my mind that
financial constraints and concern for optimisation of
resources will lead to some regional schools limiting
themselves to Forms I-V, concentrating the teaching of the
Form VI material they produce into a small number of
regional Form I-VI schools. Students with very poor passes
at the School Certificate level should not be automatically
authorised to proceed to the Form VI at government expense
– they may be authorised to attend privately-run Form VI
colleges, if their parents can afford it. (No age bar should
ever be put on private learning.) The regional schools may
have to specialise in the subjects they teach: for instance,
some may opt for science subjects and others for humanities
or arts. It won’t be necessary and may even be quite
wasteful for every regional secondary school to teach
everything. Why set up physics, chemistry and biology labs
at all schools when they are likely to be under-used at some
of them. Some facilities could even be set up sub-regionally
(science labs, swimming pools, football stadia, etc.) to
serve more than one regional school; this may require the
MOE to set up its own transportation system to ferry
children to and from such facilities, or it may contract out
the service. The process of batching must continue right
through.
It
is time to consider whether continued reliance on the
Cambridge School Certificate and Higher School Certificate
examinations meets our national education needs. The SC exam
is particularly weak in English and French: passes in these
subjects have no significance at all as regards ability to
express oneself in these languages. I have been there and I
know; besides ask any employer who is looking for young
candidates fluent in English or French. Cambridge run a
parallel set of examinations in English, in its ESOL
(English for Speakers of Other Languages) series that would
suit our purposes much better. They are conducted at five
levels, KET, PET, FCE, CAE and CPE; they would suit our
Forms I-V ideally. Cambridge also run the International GCE
series, from which schools could choose five or six subjects
other than or in addition to English to cover their
curricula. While there would be no objection to a
candidate’s offering French at a Cambridge examination,
genuine competence in French should come from the Alliance
Française examinations. Similarly, competence in Hindi
should come from Indian Institutes. It is also high time to
replace the Cambridge HSC by the International Baccalaureate
examination, unless Cambridge moves towards some form of
Baccalaureate themselves. The provision of formulae in the
Maths and Science SC and HSC exams devalues them. This is
not a plea for rote learning. The only way to acquire a
formula is to derive it from first principles until it
becomes assimilated. Even multiplication tables can be
taught that way at the primary level, thus avoiding rote
learning.
There
should be no interface between secondary and tertiary
education. Access to our government-funded tertiary
education systems must be by competition based on Form VI
examination results. The system of “laureates” at the
end of Form VI should be wound up: we are no longer a colony
looking for two places in British universities every year;
the reward for those who perform well at their Form VI
examinations must take some other form – for instance, all
qualifying students could be paid monthly stipends of a few
thousand rupees during their study period at the University
to render them less of a load to their parents and promised
a cadetship leading to a senior management position in the
Government Service. Government should award scholarships for
study abroad on merit only to those who complete a first
degree and who undertake to return to the country on the
completion of their studies if their services are required.
In
the field of education, we are virtually in a war situation.
We are under attack by the external world and we must
prepare ourselves to win that war by preparing our citizens
to meet the new challenges at the point of the sword. That
we can only do by changing our education system and our
national outlook. The changes will have to be brought in
firmly and decisively, to meet the demands of the changing
world as they manifest themselves. The authorities will have
to watch out carefully or, to use a more appropriate
expression, listen out carefully, for the signals and
“play it by ear.” That will be a better policy than
setting out every guideline in concrete and be stuck with
them in a fast changing world. Bureaucracy is the greatest
enemy of change and progress. We have to play a tactical
game, and win: that, or the begging bowl.
Paramanund
Soobarah
soobarah.param@intnet.mu
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