In the Sunday Gleaner a very interesting article was printed on the front page which stated simply “too many teachers in schools”. Now I'm pretty sure the second anybody of any reasonable intelligence who reads this article would instantly laugh out loud. Why? Because simply put the government is complaining about something it should be happy about. However the chances of the government being happy because of the existence of a large group of highly valued, qualified, and skilled educators is close to slim, this is obvious because the government is always taking steps not to improve education in Jamaica, but to slow it down and educate less people in the country.

Before I continue to speak about what the government has been doing, let's look at what are the most highly valued things to every person in the current age we are living in: Health, and Education. These are things which (as established in numerous international conventions) are the most basic Human Rights. Yes there are actually written human rights documents which say that Health and Education are things that every human being should have. Check the ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), and the American Convention on Human Rights, its right up there, right beside the right to life. So now that we have cleared that up lets look at what the government has been doing.

The first thing they did is said that they are gonna give free health-care and education. This seems to be along the right path right, I mean its a basic human right so if we are gonna be getting it for free then praise be the lord! However what wasn't stated is that the free health-care means free care as long as you somehow know somebody that can get you looked at in the hospitals before 2015, it'll be free. Then the free education is only up to high school level, and this is matched by the fact that the government isn't exactly providing all the necessary money to the high schools so they (high schools) can cover all their costs... So the high schools have to pass some of this cost on to the parents which means that free education isn't that free at all (see the problem here?).

Of course being a 3rd world poor country its completely understandable that we cant do something that not even the richer 1st world countries can afford to do... successfully. Look at Canada's numerous health care problems, its free but it still has its problems (link). As a matter of fact the only country that has done the free health-care and education bit successfully is Cuba, and they had to take really extreme measures to make it possible. Measures that the Jamaican government, and even Jamaicans as a whole are definitely not willing to make at the moment. So how exactly did the government plan to foot this bill?

Knowing all of this the government has the cojones to make the statement that there are too many teachers, and then in the same breath complain that the pass rates of our students is too low, while forgetting that our schools are badly overpopulated with teacher student ratio's in the range of 40 and 50 students to 1 teacher. Shouldn't the focus be on lowering the ratio to greater standards such as the internationally accepted 15:1 ratio? Oh and also the education minister tonight in the local news made an even bolder statement that the government might have to look OVERSEAS to hire more TEACHERS, because apparently of all the lot of the teachers available, none of them are qualified to teach (of course that last statement is false). 

So how exactly is it that this government had planned to make the education system better if they want to get rid of our more than competent teachers and go as far as to take up some foreign teachers?

(to be continued in part 2)