RG: In our opinion

It would be a fatuous understatement to suggest Bermuda’s secondary public education system deserves a failing grade. The grim reality is we have offered up generations of Bermuda students as human sacrifices to the false gods of fashionable education theory and the so-called “educationalists” who proselytise on their behalf.

For decades it’s been obvious to all but the most obdurate or wilfully blind among us that the Ministry of Education constitutes both the major component of the excessive cost of public education in Bermuda — and the major reason for its ongoing mediocrity and declining efficiency.

But we have effectively legitimised and institutionalised failure. Political expedience, cynicism and fear of alienating a large bloc of voters has prevented successive Governments from taking the action necessary to reform and recalibrate this lumbering bureaucratic dinosaur.

The Opposition’s recent call for the root-and-branch overhaul of secondary education in its response to the Throne Speech was admirably thorough and thoughtful. But it could have been taken verbatim from its 1998 “New Bermuda” election manifesto. Or any of the Throne Speech replies issued by the United Bermuda Party or the One Bermuda Alliance in subsequent years when Progressive Labour Party Governments simply further enshrined the growing failures in public education rather than address them head-on.

No one even asks what the purpose of education is anymore. Not too long ago education was intended to train the young mind to think clearly and to help parents instil a sense of discipline in the young. Today education seems to have become a tool with which to indoctrinate the young in whatever modish, anodyne generalities the educationalists believe they should think rather than to teach them how to think. The inevitable result of this misconception, of course, is that young people leave the secondary school system woefully ill-prepared to cope with Bermuda’s modern day realities.

The goal of training young minds in clear thought has been overlooked entirely.

In days gone by, one of the processes of teaching coherent thought was to include subjects like Latin, algebra and calculus on the school curriculums. The relevance of such subjects was, of course, marginal. What they did do, however, was to train the mind to think with clarity — an ability of practical use when dealing with any problem subsequently encountered in life.

This is not like “irrelevant” exercise in the case of an athlete. A work-out in the gym or jogging three miles every morning doesn’t apply directly to playing a good game of soccer or achieving a few extra inches of pole-vaulting height, for example, but is essential to the overall health, fitness and performance of the football player or pole vaulter.

The test of this eminently desirable clarity of thought was the essay question, now almost entirely supplanted in the educational system by the hit-or-miss multiple choice test. What the old system demonstrated was the ability of students to think clearly and to convey his or her thinking to others with the same clarity.

The dismal failure of the system of education devised by educational theorists and implemented by the Education Ministry are evident for all to see. The Ministry doesn’t understand the problem and has no idea what to do about it. But its functionaries are so desperate to have the public believe they are being “pro-active” we are bombarded with never-ending buzzword Band Aid initiatives to stanch the massive haemorrhaging, each one as useless as the last. “Pro-active” is, of course, a favourite civil service euphemism for verbose inactivity.

The best activity for Government to pursue would be to abolish the Ministry altogether and pay to have its students educated in an expanded private sector where the schooling is demonstrably better and the costs demonstrably less. The financial savings alone would be enormous. The benefits which would accrue to our young people and Bermuda as a whole would be incalculable.

Barring that admittedly unlikely outcome, we must hope the political will exists to finally reintroduce discipline and a rational curriculum into our secondary school system. If this means backtracking on the feel-good policies adopted by the educational theorists in recent decades, so be it.

Bermuda’s children are manifestly less well educated than they were 50 years ago and many also suffer from a total lack of self-discipline. Society as a whole is suffering acutely as a result of the fatally flawed educational theories being implemented on the Island and will continue to suffer as long as we leave ourselves at the mercy of the educational theorists.

At school as in life, self-esteem is actually more readily achieved by meeting and overcoming challenges than by continuously lowering the bar to the achievement level of the lowest common denominator. Unless the politicians finally wake up to this indisputable fact, we will keep on failing both our young people and Bermuda.