Reinventing our roles in education

The quality of life for our indigenous people won’t be determined solely by investments from the US, Japan and East Asia. More so than meets the eye, it would come from the attainment of literacy over the first quarter of the next millennium.

Indeed, there’s a good portion of the indigenous population who are in fact functional illiterates. It means, one’s inability to read and write basic English. It has nothing to do with one’s intelligence or the wealth of ideas he or she has stored in them over the years.

Too, a good percentage of public sector employees are in fact functional illiterates. These are employees who can’t read nor write whose illiteracy we’ve ignored for too long a time. Some are nearing retirement hoping that the day will come when they exit government service without someone discovering their single most fear of illiteracy trapped in them all these years.

It must be a very troublesome daily experience for them. But I could feel and see their world around them through their eyes. I constantly feel their fear at work or at home when their supervisors ask for a simple memo or a child seeks help with his or her reading or writing assignments. How could he or she complete such request when in the first instance he can’t read or scribble a simple sentence? How could he help the kid with homework when he doesn’t have the basic skills in reading and writing?

I took a quick journey back 45 years ago to define education then versus education over the past 20 years. We were taught the basics successfully by teachers who never even finished high school. These teachers must have done something right despite the odds given that some of their naughty students have gone on to become doctors, registered nurses, lawyers, certified public accountants, degreed teachers and school administrators, etc. What was it that they had then? Dedication!

What then must have gone wrong over the past two decades? I really don’t have any thoroughly analyzed answer(s) to pin down where functional illiteracy started its long devastating journey. At the outset, we could attribute it to the population explosion, the emergence of a mini-melting pot and acculturation, the outmigation from the old village to new homestead subdivisions that ruined our sense of community; the boom years that brought with it windfall profits to landowners; the beer culture; shift from re-usable to disposable items, and the instant culture.

In the process, we neglected the very basics of life that sets the indigenous community from the rest of our friends who came in from distant shores. We fell prey to more fads than the size of our fancy and fragile dinner ware. We were convinced that the good times will “always” be here only to turn paradise into the hellish isles of our own people. Those who can afford it, head out the jetways in search of a better place for their children. We treated it with indifference! Is this our vision of our children’s future?

Funneling more money into the Public School System isn’t going to resolve this mess over the long haul. And to succeed in turning this negligence around is to encourage a combination of teaching with dedication and the participation of locals in an equation that must include them from A-Z. How encouraging though that parents have returned to our schools to partake in the education of their children. It’s a good beginning that needs to be nurtured for it is most vital that we jointly prepare lifetime learning for our children. It’s the only investment that promises the greatest return over the long term!