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With the results out and the latest furore over, let's consider reality.

What is reality? Well reality is like a Bermuda Stone wall. It's just there. Implacable. Immoveable. Reality stays 'just there' unless you confront it directly and use your own muscle-power or heavy equipment or some other drastic action to move it.

Perhaps you're driving along in your $30,000 car. Perhaps, exercising your God-given free will and your 1968 Constitutional Order human right, you decide that you will ignore that Bermuda Stone wall and drive right through it.

Ten thousand dollars' worth of car damage and a long hospital stay later, you recognize and accept the reality of a Bermuda Stone wall.

That's the way it is with this Education mess. Like a Bermuda Stone wall, it was just there. Always there. And it stayed there - just there.

For twenty years, multi-degreed Educators at the Ministry of Education messed with curriculae; messed with CAT, Terra Nova, BSSC, and BSC tests; and messed with certificates and standards. They even messed with Reports and No Reports to the tax-paying public. Eventually, as with the car, they smashed into the stone wall of reality.

Over the years a tiresome succession of Ministers of Education - six in the past ten years - obfuscated about, explained away, agonized over, or ignored what was actually taking place on their watch. Still, and eventually, each Minister smashed into the stone wall.

Now we're finally acknowledging that we have hundreds of damaged people resulting from over twenty years of abysmally low - and still falling - educational standards. Now we say - all over again - that we're about to see if we can fix the current damage, and heal the system for better future performance.

This island is inundated with better-educated and infinitely more aggressive global workers who turn up in every trade and profession. Our two decades worth of spew-out of damaged under-educated Bermudians is already having a major social impact. We now have a relatively huge army of highly visible 'less employable' or 'difficult-to-employ' male Bermudians. Most - but not all - are black.

Until we acknowledge the stone wall, we cannot begin to work - drive - safely and sanely towards a real Education solution. Minister Horton, the sixth Education Minister in ten years, has acknowledged the stone wall. So what do we - what does he - need to do?

Step one

Stop tinkering with curriculae. That's all that we've been doing since the 1980s. Fix on one curriculum and get going.

Step two

Accept that - even if they never ever step off this rock - our Bermudian kids will still compete, right here in Bermuda, with the output of better functioning educational establishments that are in countries where the hunger for education is often spurred by a real gut wrenching stomach hunger.

Step three

Accept that Bermuda requires one national curriculum that delivers numeracy and literacy at levels high enough to give Bermudian kids at least an equal chance in their race for jobs.

Step four

Accept that if behaviour and other social issues are problems, then behaviour - not academics - needs to be the focus during pre-school and P1 to P2. After all, teachers complain about behaviour, and pollsters report on low literacy and numeracy amongst today's 18-24-year-olds. Obviously, then, early academic teaching hasn't been working.

Step five

Accept that if parents will not, do not, or cannot provide the kind of learning support that teachers say is required, then the public school system must be prepared to use its initiative, tap into other national resources, and expand the range of services that it delivers.

Step six

If, in order to deal with issues identified in step five, the school system needs a comprehensive breakfast, lunch, and after-school dinner cum homework programme - THEN DO IT!

Final step

If correcting years of failure means that we need to surge for a few years, and break with trite tradition and run a longer school year - THEN DO IT! After all we allowed motor cars (1946); switched to International Business (1995); changed the voting system (2002); so what's the big deal if, for a few years, we lengthen the school year?

For Bermuda's public education system, we've finally, finally, acknowledged that the nation of Bermuda ran into a stone wall. We've finally acknowledged that we got a national bloody nose. Let's stop pussyfooting and fancy-wording. This time, let's fix it for real. If we don't, the steady massing of even more angry testosterone-filled difficult-to-employ Bermudian males will burst our pretty economic bubble anyhow. Then what?[[In-content Ad]]

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