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I read with great interest an article in The Royal Gazette on Thursday, October 16, 2008. This article was basically the thoughts of Shadow Education Minister Dr. Grant Gibbons. I actually read the article three or four times. You know, first you read and react, then you read and meditate, and then you read and communicate. Hence, I will share some thoughts on the matter of replacing the Bermuda School Certificate.

I really do not get it. I really do not understand why we keep blaming a curriculum for the low level of achievement seen amongst many of our school children. The truth is that we could replace this curriculum with the perfect curriculum and we would still complain about graduation results, students' readiness to enter into the working world or the college world.

Over the past fifteen years the curriculum was changed, and yet we hear a call for it to change again. No. No. No. No. Our focus is backwards. It is not the curriculum that must be revoked, revamped, or renovated into some miraculous document. What must change is our level of expectation and acceptance when it comes to our children's achievements. That is, we have to look at each child from P1 upwards, and monitor how he is doing, in whatever curriculum we are using.

Let's look at something. We are complaining about a curriculum and saying that the curriculum is not good enough. Not good enough for whom? Just who are we talking about? This curriculum has been good enough to graduate scholars out of The Berkeley Institute. How can it be wrong, if so many are doing right by it?

Bermuda, we have backed ourselves into a corner! We moved from neighbourhood High Schools into two mega-schools. The would-be panacea has become the definite problem.

What we see today is an outcome of forecasted doom based on the 'brilliant' decision to create two mega-schools? Now we sit back and complain. We sit back and try to figure out why it has gone so wrong. What do we expect when we allow children who hate school to mix with students who want to learn? What do we expect when we mix those who cannot stand to be disciplined with those who just want to learn? What do we expect when we mix together those who curse, fight, and come against authority with those who are actually good young people?

It's too late now to go back. The mega-schools have unleashed an avalanche of mega-problems. One of the saddest problems of today is that when teachers show concern for the student who is quickly manoeuvring down the road of destruction, we have parents who come against the attempts of the educators to 'save' their child from certain destruction. How sad this is.

For those of us who are really a part of what is going on in the public system, let us not focus on the curriculum. Let us focus on the character of the children that we are producing and then placing into the school system. Slice it any way you want; it all begins at home. The education system will fail any child who is being failed by their parents.

Bermuda, we could place each child in a school with a wonderful curriculum and wonderful graduation results. The bottom line is that if that child is not disciplined or refuses to become disciplined, they will fail. Discipline begins at home, and the results of discipline are seen from P1 through to Senior 4. Let's stop the political games. Forget correcting the curriculum. Let us correct the children and create programmes to help our parents learn how to raise children to be winners in a system that many believe has been designed for their failure. Respice Finem.

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