This week's guest column is from a Jamaican resident in Barbados, writing in reaction to a local letter expressing doubts about the prospects of free education here. Beverley J. Walrond describes the extent and impact of free education in her adopted home in the southern Caribbean in the following terms:
Please allow me to respond to the letter of Xavier Allen, one of your readers, in which he mocked the dream of another of your correspondents, that Jamaica should institute free education for its children. He speaks about the expense of it and asks how Mr. Golding expects to implement it. I am a Jamaican but I have not resided in Jamaica since 1974. I wish to make it clear that I have no interest in electoral politics in Jamaica.
I would have understood Mr. Xavier Allen's point of view had I not had the opportunity to reside in Barbados since 1974. Upon arriving, I was stunned by the fact that that country was providing free primary, secondary and tertiary education to its citizens.
I had the temerity to ask Prime Minister Errol Barrow how Barbados could afford to educate all of its children in that manner? He did not respond to me immediately I was speaking to him in his living room, and it was only after I got to know him much better that I realised how much he had been angered by the question.
When I was leaving his home that evening, he quietly told me that the question ought not to have been how Barbados could afford to do it, but rather that I should have asked myself what self-respecting country would not decide that it owed its citizens an education and proper health care at a minimum. He further explained that I was talking about expense, whereas it was the most solid investment that any country could make, as it was the one that would keep on giving back to the country.
In Barbados, both parties are fully agreed that development is not mainly about roads or tall buildings or about expensive cars Barbados has those too, but that development is about developing people, and I would invite Jamaicans to visit Barbados to see the difference that educating one's population can make.
Everyone in Barbados has a chance to make something of himself or herself; it matters not who your parents are or what they have or do not have, one is required to simply send your child to school.
Both parties are agreed that there should be no discrimination between rich children and poor children - all children are entitled to be provided with all textbooks for a small yearly rental fee of $80. It results in a much more peaceful country where I can sit outside on my verandah at all times of the evening without fear.
It results in citizens who have the ability to think and be creative and who can read and understand instructions. It results in a country where most things work and where most persons have hope. Not all children make the best use of their education, but many do.
Tuitions paid by gov't
Barbadians, once they enter the University of the West Indies, have their tuition paid by the Government on whatever campus they may be and children who obtain three or four A-levels or CAPE at Grade A are awarded a Barbados scholarship. They may go to any university in the world which will accept them and the Barbados Government will pay the tuition fees and supply a further stipend. That accounts for several children from poor families being able to attend the very best universities in Canada, England and the United States of America - Waterloo, Toronto, McGill, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, University of Heriott-Watt, you name it - where they gain exposure and compete with the world's best and brightest. One year, the Government was so distressed to learn that only seven children qualified to be granted a Barbados scholarship that it launched an enquiry into the matter.
Wasted human capital
Jamaica will not do much better until it has tapped into its human capital and I believe that it has wasted this most precious resource over the years. The children of the poor have just as much chance at being brilliant and contributing to a country as the children of persons who are financially better off.
Many of Barbados's top professionals, architects, engineers, lawyers, actuaries, etc., were from poor families and are proud to have achieved. Jamaica for too long has had a kind of selection process based on wealth, which excludes many children from access to the kind of education that would allow them to make the most of their talent. I picture my beloved Jamaica as being like an out-of-gas bus, carrying persons, too few of whom have the energy to push it uphill and which is burdened by too many more persons who are incapacitated and so are unable to help it move along.
I urge us all to come to the realisation that without proper education of ALL of its citizens, which will give them hope and the means to earn a legitimate living, our future will be dark indeed in a world where education is the surest means of propelling any country forward. It is time to make the necessary investment in our people and to stop talking foolishness about the expense of it. Ignorance is far more expensive and costly to the national good.Labels: financial aid, free education, high school, scholarship, student loans |
