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Without education, young men set their ambitions no higher than baggy pants and 28 inch car rims.

Without education, young women fall for persuasive lines from aggressive males that leave them holding the baby.

Without education, children seek adventure in senseless videogames and adults are swayed by glib-talking politicians.

For decades now we've been awaiting educational reform, but there seems to be little of substance to show. We've heard about the reorganisation of the Education Ministry and the adoption of a brand-name curriculum. The idea of a longer school term has been floated. But the primary difficulty from my vantage point is that a culture of neglect and punishment pervades the entire education family.

Parts of that culture are a "focus on failure" approach and "no carrots, just stick" tilt toward punishment. Each piece of this culture interferes with the effective delivery of education.

The focus on failure approach infuses almost every aspect of education delivery. Many teachers pay more attention to red-lining a student's mistakes than gold-starring their successes. Staff room conversation slips more easily into the faults and flaws of students (and parents and other teachers) than to their exemplary qualities, and how those qualities can be spread.

At the Ministry, toxic talk shifts into high gear where derogatory analyses and comments about principals, teachers, students and even fellow Ministry staffers outweighs solution-oriented discussion.

The culture of punishment is more subtle and consequently more powerful and harder to address. At every layer of delivery a punitive attitude seems to dominate. Principals who transgress some rule, written or not, are denied funds or services, or inexplicably transferred or moved altogether out - which is punitive not only for them but also for the teachers, parents and students they serve.

Union's narrow interests

Teachers are handled with a similar attitude, though with different outcomes. Their union tends to narrowly protect teachers' interests, punishing the students and thwarting the Ministry's attempts to weed out the ineffective or the otherwise unfit from the teacher pool.

Parents who "cause trouble" are often treated as troublemakers even when they are only trying to get the best possible education for their children. Seldom are parents treated as the employers they actually are.

At the bottom rung of the ladder are the students themselves. They are known to be bullied by each other (and by parents and teachers); lectured, threatened and "disciplined" by principals; and punished by the Ministry by being "socially" promoted when they aren't ready, or held back as though it's their fault.

And with all these issues, the ultimate punishment is the secrecy and consequent suspicion that surrounds education family issues. At core, the absent ingredient is trust - it's the hardest to build and sustain, and the easiest to go missing.

Let's acknowledge that attempts are being made to reform. Choosing a brand name curriculum is the most recent example, albeit a low-hanging fruit in the scheme of things. But even these steps have been severely hampered by political career interests over-riding the interest of educating our children.

Changing the culture has to start at the top, which may be difficult for a Minister whose Cabinet chores include secrecy and loyalty bordering on the paranoid; and for a Ministry where there's a reluctance to hold officers and staffers accountable for their work and where expectations of professionalism aren't nearly high enough.

We tried local-led reform with the EPT. We've tried externally-led reform with the Hopkins Report and consultant Dr. Henry Johnson. Still the culture of failure persists and the system continues to fail our children and our community.

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