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Finally, it's official. Half the students in the Public Education system do not graduate. But that's still hiding the fact that for every one boy who does graduate, two girls graduate.

Do the numbers. Do the numbers. Eighteen years ago, about 720 Bermudian boys and girls were born. Eighteen years later, by high school time, sixty per cent - that's about 430 students - end up in the public system at Berkeley and Cedarbridge. The other 290 are at Saltus, BHS, WA, MSA, BI, in Home schools, or at other private schools in the U.S., Canada, U.K., or the Caribbean.

Of the 430 public school students who reach the final year, only half graduate. That's 215 eighteen year-olds who actually graduate. But for every girl graduate there is only one boy graduate. So out of that 215, only 144 girls graduated. Worse, only 71 boys graduated.

So who does NOT graduate? Again, do the numbers.

In the graduating year, 430 boys and girls started out. 215 boys and 215 girls. 144 girls graduate - leaving 71 girls who do not graduate. Boys? 215 boys in the graduating year. 71 graduate. 144 boys do not graduate.

Look at the number of boys who do not graduate. Look at the number of recruits who paraded around Warwick Camp. If the Regiment builds and maintains itself by taking in about 160 soldiers every year, what kind of 'Army' are we building by sending - every year, and year after year - from 130 to 150 testosterone filled, ill-educated, unskilled young males into Bermuda's national labour market. A market that is already full of better-educated, aggressive workers who've flooded into Bermuda?

Bermudians boast of having the world's highest GDP. We preen our national selves on having the world's highest per capita income. Bermudians flash their credit cards and strut around that 600 miles away continental shopping mall called the U.S.

Don't we appreciate that this world's highest per capita income means that we must also have the world's widest national income differential? Don't we see - don't we understand - that the income differential between Bermudian workers and Polish and Goan and Canadian and Romanian workers is now greater than for any other nation on this globe? Don't we see that by dumping ill-educated, under-educated, badly-prepared Bermudian youths into this high differential market, we have to be creating a mass of economic misfits? You may argue that we are not. But the absolute laws of economics decree it. Steadily arriving reality proves it.

Don't we see anything? Anything at all?

Don't we see that if ill-educated, under-educated Bermudian youths cannot compete - in Bermuda - with better educated foreigners, then, out of sheer and absolute economic necessity, the better educated foreigner will get the jobs. In fact, the foreigners MUST get the jobs, because the alternative is that the economic enterprise will either shrink or fail. Certainly, it won't grow.

And aren't we trying to expand our economy by adding hotels and by bringing in new International Business? How and where are we going to employ this growing mass - this growing army - of ill-educated under-educated people in a high skill job environment in the narrow job fields offered by the Hospitality Industry and International Business?

Bermuda's high per capita income differential acts like a huge suction pump. It is sucking in workers from every lower income country - and for us that's every other country on this globe. All 199 of them. We have a national economy that has a voracious, seemingly insatiable, appetite for Bermudian actuaries, brokers, chefs, dry-wallers, economists - but we have a public education system that spews out uneducated non-graduates who don't fit anywhere. We have a national mis-match of the worst kind.

Every year, and we know that it's been going on for over twenty years, the public system has been spitting out people who, like spat out fruit pips, sit on the surface and don't grow. Who hang around on the fringes of Bermudian society seeking to get what they cannot have. Who hang on the edges of the economy yearning to own what they cannot own. Who, fuelled by their testosterone and proximity to great and obvious wealth, get frustrated and more frustrated. Angrier and angrier.

Who, day-by-day, become more displaced. Who, in their own country, begin looking like economic refugees. Who become natural recruits for Bermuda's criminal underworld.

Don't we see any of that? Doesn't anybody see any of that? Or am I just whispering into the wind?[[In-content Ad]]

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