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Dr. Henderson Carter, Senior Lecturer in History, The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, delivering the feature address.

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Peta Rowe-Forde (right) accepts her certificate for the Diploma in Education Primary from Senior Tutor of Erdiston College, Maxine Moore.

Reading challenge

Barbados is in crisis, and an educator is confident that the teaching profession has a critical role to play in addressing the challenges this country faces.

Dr. Henderson Carter, Senior Lecturer in History, The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, as he delivered the featured address at the Erdiston Teachers’ Training College’s graduation ceremony at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre on Saturday night, maintained that at the core of the problem is the growing inability of our children to read and reason.

“This crisis is characterised by an emerging block culture, or perhaps we might want to say, an established block culture, which militates against pride and industry and pride and productivity. The crisis is also characterised by a sub-culture of savagery, which has no regard for human life, hence the shootings and the recklessness on our roads,” he said.

Carter added, “It is also characterised by the erosion of the values of our villages, and their capacity to raise a child. It was once said that the village raised the child, now some villages are places of war and children can no longer play outside. This crisis needs a multi-sectoral response – the church, government agencies, the private sector, the schools and Erdiston must play a role in reversing these trends that we now see.”

Carter, a former secondary school teacher, said in his opinion students are disruptive primarily because of reading difficulties and challenges with following the syllabus. As a result, he said more of them are leaving school uncertified. But, contending that reading is at the core of development, the university lecturer explained that even where students are placed in a vocational stream, they must still have a good grasp on their literacy skills to be successful.

With that in mind, he said Erdiston is well positioned to help address the deficits, and believes the College can work to find the extent of the problem and the reason for it. Moreover, he said the College must examine how it can expand its training in remedial education, so that each primary and secondary school can have specialised teachers in that area. Additionally, he said schools must abandon the “unwritten policy of up and out”, and instead adopt the approach of “you are not leaving until you can read”.

Dr. Carter is also of the belief that the Ministry of Education should set national reading targets, provide support and mobilise the entire community to ensure all Barbadians can read. He said such reading programmes must include stories on Barbadian culture and history, so that persons have a better appreciation of the country’s past.

“I call again on the Government of Barbados to reintroduce history and geography as discrete subjects from Form 1 to 3 at least, in our secondary schools. And the history should not be boring, cannot be boring… If you want to engender love for your country and pride in your country, we need to tell and teach our children about our culture, Barbadian culture and Barbadian history,” he contended.

Carter made the point while contending that there is economic value in reading, preparing Barbadians to work here and abroad. His comments came as he said that reading will also assist in the strengthening of the STEM subjects – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

“We must talk about STEAM and not STEM because Engineering, Mathematics, all of these things are built on the Arts, they are built on reading,” he maintained. (JRT)

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