Two MPs on opposite sides of the House of Assembly shook up a long-winded and often repetitive debate on public education with impassioned outbursts last night.

Opposition backbencher Maxwell Burgess got the attention of members with a speech he admitted he had given before in which he claimed education was “Bermuda’s apartheid”.

“Public education suffers not in total but in large part because it’s a black thing,” he railed. “It’s our problem as blacks and we as blacks must be prepared to fix it.”

Earlier, Environment Minister Neletha Butterfield spoke of her anger at the number of children being failed and suggested that the problems could have been nipped in the bud almost two decades ago — but that no one was prepared to listen back then.

Ms Butterfield — who served a brief eight-week term as Education Minister last year — set up an alternative learning centre in her basement many years ago and has since helped countless students, including many in prison, gain qualifications.

She told the House that when she carried out a review of why students were dropping out of school in 1990 she found a desperate lack of statistical information.

Despite her warnings, poor records on educational attendance and attainment continued to be kept, she claimed. She said there was little if any data on what happened to students after they left the system.

“It’s difficult to assess the real effectiveness of the system,” she said. Ms Butterfield, an educator at CARE (Children and Adults Reaching for Education), told a silent chamber that it was easy to spot when a child wasn’t going to “make it” but that not enough had been done to ensure they did.

“I have sat here all afternoon and I have tried to compose myself because I saw it,” she said, adding that a culture of “blame, blame, blame” wasn’t going to fix the problem.

Mr. Burgess, former Shadow Public Safety Minister, said the recent review of public education carried out by UK professor David Hopkins and his team was “really a review of black education”.

“It’s black parents having black children going to black schools and having black teachers and being administrated by blacks,” he said. He added: “We have seen an education system borne out of elitism.”

The MP, who is standing down at the next election after resigning from the Shadow Cabinet earlier this year, said the Hopkins Report should have taken into account the historical context of education on the Island and the fact that the whole system came from racism.

He said parents needed to be told that principals were in charge and that they shouldn’t challenge that authority. “It’s not a place for you to teach your children disrespect,” he said.

Mr. Burgess added: “We have to tell our students that failing is not an option. We are already close to importing close to a third of our workforce. If our failure rate keeps going at the rate it won’t be long before it’s 50 percent.”