A veteran Bermudian educator has called for a Commission on Learning before Government goes any further with its education reform plans.

Mrs. Marion DeJean -- who was the first head of the Education Department's Time Out programme for disruptive students -- said the public secondary school system was "setting up'' students, particularly black males, for failure.

And she warned that unless educators looked within for solutions on the developmental needs of young people, all plans for restructuring the school system would fail.

"The most important commission is one we have never had,'' Mrs. DeJean said.

"We have never had a commission on learning. We agreed to logistic changes, moving people around. But until we understand what we did was very harmful, we will never go forward.'' Mrs. DeJean said Bermuda had created "crazy-making situations that create failure, frustration and anger''.

"We still give people number values. You're a 25 percent, you're a six and you're a five,'' she said. "There are a lot of things we do we don't have to do. Because it's possible for everybody to succeed in some way.

"And we have to stop thinking of those children, and these children. A lot of that kind of thinking is arrogance.

"One of the craziest things I have heard lately is that business people criticise guidance counsellors for not directing young people to business opportunities. But business people have no understanding of the extent to which a lot of young people are locked out of the opportunity to enter the college or job market. "We can use all kinds of sophisticated instruments for assessing interest and talent and so on.

Veteran educator wants Commission on Learning But this is like a Catch-22 situation. You create this failing situation where the courses are not there for them to have options in. So they are locked out.'' Mrs. DeJean said that as time had changed, children changed, and so should methods of education.

"We were very compliant learners, but that has changed,'' the former Sandys Secondary teacher said. "Young people today have to learn to make judgments about things that are right and wrong, even in history.

"And English is taught so differently now, from when I started to teach. But it does not mean kids learn less. But you have to be more analytical.

Everything is more value loaded.

Bermuda had adopted "the worst of British education'', she stressed.

"Even Britain is moving away from it,'' she said. "Their GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) is much more analytical than the GCE (General Certificate of Education). Things have to make sense to students.

"If you want to produce culturally-developed, analytical young people you can do it.'' Such a system, Mrs. DeJean added, could be developed by setting up a commission of learning with veteran and current educators focusing on the secondary school level where most of the problems were.

"Every country does it regularly,'' she said. "Britain did it before it went to the GCSE. Ontario does it about every ten years. It is something that you have to do on a regular basis.'' Mrs. DeJean said she was urging the Education Department to "open themselves to discussion and sharing. There are a lot of people who would like to share, not because they want their jobs,'' she said. "They want to share because this is their country, they love the children.'' She added that there was a pool of retired, experienced local teachers with wealth of knowledge to share. They included middle school consultant of Toronto Mrs. Mavis Simons who lives in Bermuda; Portuguese Bermudian Mr.

Daniel DeSilva who is a life member of the Canadian Association of Administrators, supervisor of schools, and a former principal of both secondary and primary schools; Mr. Robert Adams who had worked for the Board of Education for Nova Scotia in teacher training; and Mrs. Cynthia Taylor who created the grade 13 curriculum in Hamilton, Ontario.

"They did not want her to leave,'' said Mrs. DeJean, who along with her husband, spent some 15 years in Canada after teaching in Bermuda for 17 years.

She stressed that a commission of learning should not be seen as an attempt to get rid of those at the Education Department, but rather a chance to look at the pedagogy, curriculum, new techniques of teaching, and to recognise those "things we need to throw out''.

Mrs. DeJean -- who chaired the former Amalgamated Bermuda Union of Teachers 1982 board of inquiry which recommended getting rid of the controversial 11-plus transfer exam -- said: "We should have schools that white and black middle-class kids go to comfortably.

"But the longer you continue creating this lower class of people who are in trouble, the more people move away from them. So people who used to believe in public education, desperately try to get their kids into private schools.''