A breakdown of homes as well as an increase in criminal behaviour and violence is becoming pervasive in schools and people are unaware until “you’re waiting for your child to come home and you hear they get dragged out of a car and killed,” says Opposition MP Fazal Karim.
Karim alluded to Thursday’s murders of Laventille students Denilson Smith and Mark Richards when the MP spoke in yesterday’s parliamentary debate on an opposition motion.
This called on the Government to take urgent steps to ensure students are provided with text/workbooks and other learning materials in fulfilment of commitments given for the 2015-2016 academic year.
Karim said if authorities did not do their work in classrooms, the situation could manifest in the form of “Thursday’s unfortunate incident...you can speak to the parents and offer condolences, but you never know how it feels until it happens to you.”
He said authorities needed to ensure that students had the necessary tools to learn and that leadership and other skills were learned and classroom management done.
Karim accused the Government of trivialising education by recently instituting 12.5 per cent VAT on educational materials including books and computer technology.
Quoting Sparrow’s calypso on education being the foundation, Karim said T&T was once seen as the Caribbean’s knowledge capital and work/textbooks allowed students to excel.
“You must have the power of the mind to move a country forward.”
He said one computer class could reach millions and that the People’s Partnership (PP) was going to institute an electronic book concept. But he said placing VAT on schoolbooks was an attack on functional literacy and students’ literary path and would severely decrease education quality, especially for those unable to afford it.
“It will create educational hunger and starvation, and demotivate students. How will we compete in scholarships?” he asked.
Karim said the situation would create a class-stratified society where those who “have” could buy books and technology and access better education than those who didn’t “have.”
He said the Government had not given a clear position on the PP’s laptop initiative and T&T couldn’t diversify and compete without being up to date: “Paying lip service to education won’t get T&T far.”
Acting Education Minister Terrence Deyalsingh, saying the PNM had done a poor job of telling T&T what it had done for education, detailed some of the PNM’s achievements.
He questioned the data to confirm if the PP’s laptop plan had done what it was supposed to, or to show if it had done anything for T&T, and the curriculum for the initiative.
Deyalsingh said the PP’s e-book plan was an election gimmick since only a handful of local publishers had the e-book version of textbooks and some had voiced concern about data protection, copyright and physical distribution of books. He said connectivity wasn’t addressed, there was no platform to host the service and the one provider the PP engaged had problems with the service.