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I suppose we should be thrilled that a public golf course will get a $13 million facelift. That may be good news for the golfing fraternity, but viewing it alongside the crisis in Bermuda's education system, I am not impressed.

Without first class education, all notions of empowerment are a facade. We may talk, exhort and legislate all we wish, but if our people are to find places in the management strata of international business - or tourism, for that matter - they will need first class education.

I feel genuinely sorry for the frontline soldiers in public education, our teachers and school principals. They have been hanging on, trying on one hand to deliver the best product and with the other hand, trying to keep too many more pieces of the system from falling off.

Last year Education Minister Horton promised implementation of reforms would begin in September. And given the Premier's penchant for full-court media announcement, we would surely have been told if anything was being implemented, no matter how trivial.

The Premier also promised when he was seeking the Premiership in October 2006 that education would get high priority with a focus on teaching and learning.

He exhorted that teachers would be consulted and listened to. Instead, substitute teaching has been demoted, teachers' issues are shunted from one education official to another without resolution, and teachers themselves are discounted by not being engaged in the reform process.

A vital component of education reform is restoring public confidence in education and the core ingredient for that restoration is constant and substantive communication about the analysis, proposals and steps of reform. What aspects of the system will be repaired? What parts will be excised? What will be replaced and what will be newly introduced?

While teachers and principals are waiting and waiting for real reform to take place, the system itself is in various stages of self-destruction.

For teachers, it's like being on sand that's shifting all the time because no one knows who is at the tiller. There is a shuffling of education officials at virtually every level of the department and no one wants the leadership jobs.

I am hearing that we are losing teachers at an accelerating rate; that teacher frustration is mounting; that teachers are under increasing stress and anxiety. Local teachers are feeling more discouraged while non-Bermudian teachers are experiencing heightened insecurity about their jobs. Throughout the system there is less joy and more pain.

And while more teachers seem to be leaving, fewer are entering the profession. We hear of schemes to attract people to jobs in tourism or international business but I'm just not hearing the same kind of focus and attention being given to education. Where are the incentives for our bright school-leavers to enter the teaching profession? Where is the investment in teacher training scholarships? Where is the incentive for teachers to stay in the profession? Where are the programmes to build pride in the process of teaching?

Children come into the world with an insatiable curiosity. They are designed to learn, their internal chemistry gets rewarded from learning.

Teachers go into the profession with a burning desire to assist and foster that learning process. Parents at every economic stratum recognise the importance of education and most would do anything to help their children to get ahead. With these forces pushing so hard in the direction of educational success it is disheartening to witness ongoing signs of failure.

It is even more disheartening to feel that education reform is a diminishing priority for our leaders. As the foundation for every layer of achievement, education needs our full and focused attention.[[In-content Ad]]

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