Even though Dr Rupert Roopnaraine has been transferred out of the Ministry of Education, where he was the Senior Minister, to become the head of a new Department in the Ministry of the Presidency, one of his pet peeves has moved from being a personal idiosyncrasy to a formal proposal to the public secondary schools of the country. The proposal would place a cap on the number of subjects students can write at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination to ten.
One of the earliest pronouncements of Roopnaraine, after he became Minister of Education in May 2015, was on this topic: “I believe that this multitude of subjects that students are doing, we will have to have a look at that. Frankly, it has always really bugged my mind to know how a student can be doing 18 subjects and more.” However, when the then Registrar of the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), Dr Didacus Jules, was asked for his professional opinion, he said, “We don’t consider it to be a matter under CXC’s purview; this is a matter for parents, the schools and ultimately the Ministry.”
“Frankly”, it would appear that Dr Roopnaraine was barking up the wrong tree. One would have thought he should have been more focused on providing the resources to the schools to deliver the curriculum more effectively, or making a determination on the appropriateness of some of the Ministry’s regulations. For instance, why was French, and not Chinese or Hindi, one of the compulsory subjects in the senior secondary schools? Maybe when Roopnaraine took French, it was de rigueur so as to be considered “cultured”. Of what use is it to our schoolchildren now?
The point that Roopnaraine refused to consider was that no one in the school system was coercing students to write more subjects than was the norm back in the 1950s, when Roopnaraine was at Queens. The policy of the Ministry, which is being reaffirmed in the present, is that students require passes in just five subjects, inclusive of Mathematics, English and English Literature, drawn from four streams to matriculate. The streams are Arts, Business, Science and Technical and Vocation Education. This means that, for matriculation, a student only has to choose two subjects from his/her stream in addition to the three compulsory subjects. This does not make sense, and encourages mediocrity. And this does not even consider proposals that Social Studies/Civics also ought to be made compulsory, to encourage “nation-building”.
When it is considered that the children are ‘streamed’ in 3rd Form/9th Grade at around age 13/14, it is clear that they are being herded into specialisations at much too early an age. In this age of information, being available via Google on all of the accumulated knowledge of mankind, the stress should be on conveying how that knowledge should be analysed as best as possible. And this is basically what the “subjects” in high school do — History, Geography, etc.
From this perspective, what the Ministry of Education ought to be doing, now that Dr Roopnaraine has been removed, is not to place restrictions on the number of subjects that can be written at CSEC, but to shift the curriculum away from the cramming of facts towards critically analysing those facts that are always available in the “cloud”. Is he now to be in charge of “educational innovations”?
Dr Roopnaraine, evidently oblivious to the implications on his demand for a restriction of number of subjects students could write, had also suggested that the curriculum be broadened to include some compulsory non-traditional, “non-academic” subjects to include Physical Education, Fine Arts and Music. We agreed with that suggestion, but they were not included in the Ministry’s current proposal – probably on the Procrustean 10-subject demand.
In sum, it is our contention that the present system that prevails, where the teachers in the schools have to screen and approve the number of subjects individual students can write at CSEC, should continue.
