It isn't always easy to avoid criticizing the Rowley regime, but sometimes it becomes absolutely necessary when it becomes apparent that rather than dealing with what is or ought to be important for the well being of the society, that the Government is operating more like a business rather than a government. Put another way, I have often said that you cannot run a country the way you run a business. Running a business entails not only balancing the books but making a profit. Running a country means that decisions have to be taken which are not only in the best short term interests of the society, but also in the best long term interests as well.
What has aroused my concerns is the announcement at the end of last week by the erstwhile Minister of Education in which massive cuts were declared in the GATE program ... the program which provides subsidized tertiary education for a wide swath of students. That the cuts are going to hurt many students is a given. What is also a given is that there will be a sizable number of very poor students who will be unable to access tertiary education.
So? Let them eat cake? The problem here is that of all the programs or facilities for people that ought to be cut, I would argue that education is just about the last one that ought to be tampered with. No country can lift itself out of poverty without a good, viable and efficient education system. That the PNM and Dr. Eric Williams did just that in the period 1956 to about 1970 is true and we owe a tremendous amount to Dr. Williams for this is true.
But here we are many, many years later and education seems to have taken a back seat in the Rowley regime's push to modernize the country. There are some people even who detect a certain racism in the regime's effective downgrading and cancelling many of the GATE programs. These people argue that they think this because they see East Indians as being the major beneficiaries of GATE and that this is a way of slowing down the rise of the East Indians against the Africans in the society. I don't know if that perception can be backed up with facts, but the mere fact that the perception exists is as unfortunate as it is disturbing and means that the regime is seen by many to be racist. Beauty, after all, is in the eye of the beholder and not the beholden.
Look, in my opinion it is better to stay away from thoughts like this. It is my respectful view that regardless of whatever is motivating the regime to slash spending on education it needs to do a complete 180 degree turn and pour ALL the resources into the system that we have at our disposal ... even if this means that badly needed projects elsewhere (e.g., Dr. Rowley's plans for East Port of Spain) have to be put on hold or cancelled. There is NOTHING more important than education. I would even argue that our health care system (which is most important) comes in a close second behind education.
We don't, for example, pay our teachers enough. The starting salary for a teacher is around TT$6,000 per month. That is ridiculous! It should be three times that amount! And it should go up by at least three times for every level after that. If you pay peanuts, do you expect to get world class scholars?
This country will never fix itself until we start at the beginning. It will take about twenty years to fix the problem. But most governments think only in terms of five year cycles. Time for a new Constitution? But that is another argument again!
But since then our national attention turned elsewhere and we did not pay the kind of attention to the education system that we ought to have paid. For example, in my opinion the salaries that we pay teachers is nothing short of a scandal and a complete disgrace. I understand that the starting salary for a brand new teacher is somewhere in the vicinity of $5,000 per month. This is awful. It should be AT LEAST three times that amount. Then again, it is not
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