Ronald Thwaites | Astonishing turnarounds

There is one state in the US where they calculate the number of prison cells needed in 15 years time by checking the number of male students leaving grade 3 who cannot read. We could do the same. Except that we really don’t build new lockups. We just cram more people into existing hellholes or, like this year, slaughter suspects rather than arrest them.

FRUSTRATING PROGRESS

There are anywhere between 6,000 and 8,000 children each year who pass beyond the crucially impressionable age of eight years without achieving the minimum character and academic skills needed for a fruitful, law-abiding life. Two respected high school principals with whom I interacted last week reported that the majority if not the entirety of their entering students presented with serious literacy, numeracy and character deficits. Their teachers, recruited to teach the unwieldy National Standards Curriculum cannot respond effectively to such a pandemic.

A rough survey of 30 or so males five years after they had “graduated” from high school found that almost a half were occasional hustlers, others aimless on street corners, in jail or dead. Most of them had fathered one or more children.

IMPRUDENT SPENDING

It costs more than a $1 million to keep someone in custody for a year. If a similar sum of money was applied to prevent or remediate this COVID-like educational plague in the school system it would be better spent.

Yet there is no more money in last week’s supplementary budget for education. This is the opposite of building back stronger. This society is yet to understand that transforming education is a national security issue.

WHAT’S REALLY ESSENTIAL

The audience which came to hear Mr Donovan Lewis’ reasoning last week expected to glean investment strategy and even some hot tips from this accomplished wealth creator and manager. Instead, and to their greater benefit, they heard lessons about character formation and business ethics laced with Christian values and attitudes.

The senior students were urged to grasp a new kind of ambition – not for status, wealth and fame but for integrity, courage and public service. Lewis, like the presenters who preceded him, powerfully credited his traditional family relationships – mother, wife and children, as pivotal to his success.

Donovan Lewis never had the opportunity of the heavily subsidised high school education which all Jamaican young persons now enjoy. Many of us scorn or take for granted this hard-fought right. We need to appreciate our history, not to pose as offended victims but as strong survivors determined to thrive. Is that spirit and the accompanying behaviour principles being taught? Shouldn’t the hurricane events jolt us to a new sense of gratitude and national purpose?

DEEPER REHABILITATION

After Hurricane Melissa catastrophe, this nation cannot be satisfied to just rehabilitate our head-space and physical infrastructure to what they was before October 28. That political economy and social order was unfair to most citizens. Building back stronger does not only mean more concrete and hurricane straps. It is the opportunity, wrought out of adversity, to fashion astonishing turnarounds at every level.

I love Søren Kierkegaard ’s aphorism: “Life has to be understood backwards but lived forward.” Much of our very recent history has been marked by violence, disunity and gross inequality. This time use our considerable agency and resources to be emotionally secure, spiritually conscious and practically competent.

SELF-RESPECT

Even as new Caesar show murderous intent in making the Caribbean their mare nostrum, in our renewed self-respect we need to find common cause to become more self-sufficient in food, energy and productive capacity. We won’t cancel anybody. We can harness populist energy not to show arrogance and red-eye but to make doing good the most fashionable ingredient of livity.

THINGS WE CAN DO

By now I hoped the National Housing Trust would have sponsored a competition among building professionals to design and build in four months a sturdy $10 million house which homeless people can discover hope and plan investment. Rev up existing law and dismantle stifling bureaucracy for the issuance of land titles.

There are quickly constructed metal warehouses (probably made from Jamaican bauxite) which, strategically placed, could provide alternatives for the multiple thousands of displaced, frustrated victims and be useful for schools and community facilities thereafter.

By now, populist energy would be stirred if investment was flowing into low-cost greenhouses to sprout food instead of endless capital splashed around for high-rise caves. Just suppose solar panels were jamming incoming relief containers even while our governors and the JPSCO spar with each other.

VIRTUOUS 2030 GOALS

How about incentivising teachers and schools to eradicate student illiteracy, innumeracy and pitiable character formation by 2030. It will be money well spent if we divert some of the advertising money being wasted on ministerial self-promotion and instead invest it in promoting a respect agenda and wholesome family life. What an avoidable travesty last week where two woman, one reportedly pregnant, fight over a man, one to her death the other to prison for life while the man who played them both walks free.

Revenue from taxes will be reduced during the recovery period. But what if Parliament were to free itself from the miserable constipation of its backward procedures and by measured interrogation and commitment to transparency, persuade us of the fairness of public expenditure.

Then rich people would not spend a fortune trying to evade taxes and we middle and working class folk would better appreciate the sacrifices we make for the public purse.

We don’t need the IMF’s money to do any of this and much more. We need to humbly acknowledge the moral weaknesses and consequential systemic fault lines which the hurricane has exposed and resolve to make crisis the platform for astonishing turnarounds.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com