Barbados Education Reform Urged to Prioritize Standard English Proficiency for National Development

My attention was drawn to a letter in another section of the Press, submitted by Professor Michael Howard, titled Education reform must focus on standard English. He asserted that Barbadian young people should learn to speak and write standard English if they want to secure higher paying jobs as well as compete internationally in global markets.

The late Leonard ‘Lenny’ St Hill once remarked that “the money paying out in standard English”. He, like Professor Howard, was making the point that students need to have a command of the grammatical and syntactical rules of the English language. He would have agreed that conversing in the international marketplace must be conducted in formal English.

My own concern is less with high-paying jobs or how “the money paying out” than with the broad goals of education as a mechanism for total national development. It is for this reason that I concur with Professor Howard’s assertion that the Barbados education reform must of necessity focus on standard English. We inhabit a region that is increasingly in a state of intellectual and cultural retreat in the more meaningful sense of those two terms. We are inhabiting a state of intellectual and cultural attrition, if you wish.

As a professor of economics at the UWI, Howard has himself noted a decline in language competence both in the spoken and written forms. He noted that some of his university students “refused” to contribute to class discussions or ask questions because they were afraid to speak standard English. Presumably, this applies to tutorial classes where students are required to speak up and express their points of view. Language communication is vital to the educational process at all levels, from nursery to post-doctoral. Increasingly, students at all levels are prone to retreat into the dialect to articulate their opinions. Many do not know or understand the appropriateness of language use. In some cases, they seem not to care. A student who passed CXC English Language in fourth form remonstrated when he was told to repeat the subject in the fifth year. As far as he was concerned, “I passed dat a’ready.”

There are three factors that are influencing current trends. The first is that much of education has lost its soul. Students no longer value education for its intrinsic value because, like so much in the culture, it has become transactional. One is forever making the point that formal schooling functions within the context of a culture. A Ms Kelly from Champlain, Illinois called Down to Brass Tacks on Monday. A teacher of chemistry, she complained about the work ethic of her students. She noted that her students, generally speaking, want less work, more time to do that work and higher grades for increasingly modest performance. Any criticism of submitted work is seen as the teacher’s dislike of the particular student.