Former Attorney General Phil Perinchief yesterday lambasted both political parties for failing to fix Bermuda's education system — and unveiled his own radical plan for change.

The outspoken former senator — who lost his Cabinet post after the last General Election — told the parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Education he would abolish middle schools, create four new senior schools and get rid of CedarBridge Academy, transforming it into a tertiary college offering four-year degrees.

Bermuda College, argued Mr. Perinchief, should become a university offering master's degrees and training for teachers and nurses.

He said the two-year associate degrees on offer there right now were "half degrees" with little credibility at North American colleges and "zero acceptance" in the UK and Europe.

"It is a sad fact that Bermuda, as one of the richest and purportedly most sophisticated places in the world, cannot even boast of having at least one four-year degree awarding tertiary institution," Mr. Perinchief told the cross-party committee.

"It is a huge international embarrassment. Visitors must think we are a nation of idiots or intellectual lightweights. It is a national disgrace, actually, and says nothing flattering about the leaders, the intelligentsia and the academics in our society."

Mr. Perinchief, a member of the Berkeley Institute's governing board, explained to the committee at the start of his presentation that he was making his submission simply as a concerned citizen.

He started out by describing the United Bermuda Party's restructuring of the public education system in the 1990s, when middle schools were introduced, as a "colossal and wholesale savaging" which wreaked "havoc and dislocation".

But he was equally critical of the PLP, which he said missed a "supreme opportunity to halt and reverse the anomalies in the public school system" on coming to power in 1998.

"To date, the PLP has only managed to exacerbate and perpetuate the structural defects wrought by the UBP and the natural evolution of the educational system as a whole as it adjusts to meet society's ever-changing demands," he said.

Mr. Perinchief's solution would be to turn Clearwater, Whitney, TN Tatem and Sandys Secondary middle schools into senior schools and keep Berkeley as the central senior school.

PLP MP Michael Scott praised the idea as having merit and described it as "going back to what we had". He said creating senior schools in the east and west could help foster a healthy competitive spirit, give younger pupils older role models to look up to and get rid of "this nonsense about gangs".

Government Whip Lovitta Foggo said the plan offered a detailed outline for how the education system could move forward in Bermuda. The former teacher said she had been totally opposed to the UBP's restructuring of the public school system. "I'm not amazed by the struggles we are going through today," she said.

Shadow Education Minister Grant Gibbons said Mr. Perinchief's submission was a "heavily political document". "I took a certain amount of offence even though I wasn't involved at the time," he said, of Mr. Perinchief's criticism of the UBP's restructuring effort. "I do think you have been unfair and revisionist in your approach."

The Joint Select Committee on Education is reviewing how the ten recommendations in last year's Hopkins Report on public schools are being enacted in order to report back to Parliament. Its next meeting is on Tuesday at 1 p.m. at the House of Assembly Atrium.