Submitted by Bush tea
It seems that Barbados’s resident expert on everything from homosexuality, to God and now China has turned his attention to the 11 plus exam and specifically to its abolition. It seems that every day now, Wickham has been using his VOB provided call-in platform to insult and down cry the process used for decades to allocate Barbadian children to the secondary school system. Bush tea is calling for the recruitment of Mr Wickham as a special consultant in the Ministry of education, with the role of removing the 11 plus scourge from our society.
……Why not? It seems that we have reached a stage where idiots are highly valued in national decision making.
Wickham would fit well into the kind of system we have, where someone could decide to construct flyovers and execute road works to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars – WITHOUT AN AGREED PLAN; where Greenland, after 50 million dollars is back to square 1, and where we build a new $300 million prison and put the same jokers who burnt down the old one to run it. Peter will be ‘at home’ in a leadership position in this country where we have no plan for energy, no plan for traffic, none for solid waste etc.
Fair, transparent and democratic
The 11 plus exam is one of the very best aspects of the education system of Barbados. It is fair, transparent, and democratic. The 11 plus removes the traditional advantage that wealth normally provides such that it is now tradition that the children of all classes in Barbados have equal access to the very best academic choices. With our limited resources, it is obvious that the arrangement where children of similar abilities are grouped and then moved along at their various learning capacities is most efficient.
Most important, by any standard used, Barbados stands out as a model country in terms of our ability to produce large percentages of literate citizens, a well educated population and significant percentages of citizens proceeding to complete tertiary education….. The system works fairly well.
There is ONLY one real reason why people like Wickham are seeking to scrap the 11 plus system, it is to feed the inferiority complex that they have developed within themselves, as a result of not being able to say that they are graduates of Harrison College. This obviously hurts Wickham gravely…. But Bush tea thinks that he was lucky indeed to get into Foundation.
The problem as I indicated before- is Wickham’s ego and his delusions of grandeur which are not supported by the appropriate inherent ability and aptitude.
Again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with our 11 plus system. It effectively screens our children by academic ability and should enable us to focus our scarce resources to produce significant numbers of educated citizens who do have the capacity and aptitude to perform needed leadership roles for the country. It is no coincidence that most of our leaders have been HC graduates – the system is designed to produce exactly that result.
Anyone with a little common sense knows that when we equalize conditions, we always settle at the lowest common denominator. High standards are derived by selection and dedication to purpose. How are Olympic athletes developed? In any case, if we allocate schools based on zoning only, some schools will still turn out be better than others, and inevitably, those who of us can afford to, will choose to ‘live’ in those zones and we will be back to a situation of education by class.
The problem is not the ‘prestige’ schools, it is the poor planning that our Ministry of Education puts into that group of children whose natural talents does not include academics. If Wickham wants to know what really needs to be done to improve education in Barbados, Bush tea (who also did not go to HC) is more than willing to offer suggestions
… We need some MORE 11 Plus tests….
The existing 11 plus works extremely well to identify and classify academic talents in our 11 year olds.
We need additional ‘11 plus’ test to classify our children into the following (and other) talent categories:
- Arts and Music
- Sports
- Industrial skills
- Culinary arts
- etc
We should then configure our schools to group ALL the various talented students by seeking to cater to their respective strengths. This way, each school would be a Harrison College in its respective area of talent development.
This would of course, be a far easier means of improving our system, but why should we consider such an approach? After all there are no million-dollar contracts (with kick-backs) involved. It does call for a little thought; but we would all be winners…. Under such a scheme, even Peter Wickham may have found some (yet untapped) talent that could have seen him becoming an asset to the country.
Scrap what 11 plus what?!?
Let us scrap Peter Wickham from promulgating his idiotic nonsense day after day on VOB.
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