President Anthony Carmona is calling for Caribbean educators to “face some hard facts” and urgently explore much-needed reforms.
Caribbean education systems are in dire need of overhauling, evidenced by the breakdown at several levels, he said.
Delivering the keynote address at a conference of the Association of Caribbean Higher Education Administrators (ACHEA), held at the University of the West Indies Learning Centre, St Augustine, Thursday, Carmona urged educators to consider expanding curricula beyond tourism and petrochemicals, two mainstays of several economies across the region.
The 14th ACHEA conference was themed “Revisioning, reassessing and recommitting for success in higher education.”
Educators now needed to give due consideration to making Information Technology studies compulsory at the primary and secondary school levels, he said, although he acknowledged serious challenges in accessing computer hardware and Internet connectivity for students in some Caribbean countries.
Carmona said the theme was apt as Caribbean education “needs rebranding and reinventing in order to capitalise fully on our most important resource, our human resource.”
Aggressive remedial action was needed at the tertiary level, he said.
“University lecturers often complain that matriculated students have great difficulty in composing a grammatically correct sentence, cannot pronounce words correctly and display a lack of deductive reasoning.”
It is not enough simply to throw one's hands up in disgust, he said, adding that ACHEA members possessed the unique ability to devise plans and programmes necessary to bring about change in the higher education system.
Once a teacher himself, Carmona earned applause when he spoke of the under-appreciation and underpayment that many teachers face.
But he called on administrators to embrace a new role, which includes the responsibility to let the business community know that “corporate social responsibility is not only about buying football jerseys for football teams.
“The time has come for the private sector, for example, the oil and gas industries and tourism, to have a substantial hand in designing the appropriate secondary and tertiary curricula.”
ACHEA chairman Floris Fraser, agreed that the time had come for tertiary level institutions to explore innovative ways to deal with global challenges and social changes.