This is Cepep country
28/05/07 19:23 Filed in: Musing
This
Sunday, Prime Minister Patrick Manning promised that the young
people of Trinidad and Tobago would be a special focus of the
PNM.
“Young people of this nation, I remind you today, this party is for you. This Government exists for you,” Manning was reported to have said.
This revelation came on the heels of the PM's promise that Cepep, the make-work employment scheme that is the heir to the legacy of URP and DEWD, would be "forever."
URP and DEWD for those of you just joining Trinidad and Tobago's social assistance programmes, were similar efforts to create employment for the unemployable what were plagued with corruption, ghost gangs and favoritism.
Now politicians often trade in scary statements, but endorsing this programme as anything but a stop gap measure to occupy the undereducated mass of children disgorged by an education system that faltered in the last decade of the 20th century is absolutely terrifying to me.
It should be no secret to anyone that teachers left the education system in droves between 1985 and 2005, finding better salaries in almost any other branch of employment that needed educated people.
I realised this myself working in the media during that time as a consultant when it became clear that almost every good sub-editor working at a national newspaper had left the teaching profession to build pages in Quark Xpress.
Now that there is better salary parity in the teaching service, the press is scrunting for subs again, but two generations came of age without the benefit of our best teaching resources, the people who could leave the profession and return to it when things got better.
To be sure, there must have been some committed teachers who stayed with their students because they believed in their profession, but I meet too many young people, including my nephews, who were taught by uninspired wielders of chalk and found no connection between their future after examinations and the potential of the classroom.
I'm not sure that things have really changed that much, because even with better salaries, there are far more seats to fill in front of the class in an era of ambitious education goals and burgeoning numbers of students at two local Universities.
As I write this, there's an appalling advertisement featuring Felix Edinborough for National Literacy Day that features young people reading Sparrow's education badly.
If Cepep has any role in a Trinidad and Tobago so flush with money, it is to create a bridge between the hapless limbo that a wholly inadequate education system left thousands of our young people lost in and a world of knowledge work that basically has no use for them.
I don't sneer at people who work with their hands. Anyone who has seen me paint a wall knows that I have no basis to look down on a craftsman who is good at their job. If Cepep was training a lost generation to be craft entrepreneurs, building a skill base that would build the infrastructure that is springing up all around us, that would be one thing. The Government's Auditors who have found scandalous waste in the Cepep financial procedures and the promises of a Prime Minister who wants to extend a band-aid into an everlasting crutch suggest something far less desirable.
“Young people of this nation, I remind you today, this party is for you. This Government exists for you,” Manning was reported to have said.
This revelation came on the heels of the PM's promise that Cepep, the make-work employment scheme that is the heir to the legacy of URP and DEWD, would be "forever."
URP and DEWD for those of you just joining Trinidad and Tobago's social assistance programmes, were similar efforts to create employment for the unemployable what were plagued with corruption, ghost gangs and favoritism.
Now politicians often trade in scary statements, but endorsing this programme as anything but a stop gap measure to occupy the undereducated mass of children disgorged by an education system that faltered in the last decade of the 20th century is absolutely terrifying to me.
It should be no secret to anyone that teachers left the education system in droves between 1985 and 2005, finding better salaries in almost any other branch of employment that needed educated people.
I realised this myself working in the media during that time as a consultant when it became clear that almost every good sub-editor working at a national newspaper had left the teaching profession to build pages in Quark Xpress.
Now that there is better salary parity in the teaching service, the press is scrunting for subs again, but two generations came of age without the benefit of our best teaching resources, the people who could leave the profession and return to it when things got better.
To be sure, there must have been some committed teachers who stayed with their students because they believed in their profession, but I meet too many young people, including my nephews, who were taught by uninspired wielders of chalk and found no connection between their future after examinations and the potential of the classroom.
I'm not sure that things have really changed that much, because even with better salaries, there are far more seats to fill in front of the class in an era of ambitious education goals and burgeoning numbers of students at two local Universities.
As I write this, there's an appalling advertisement featuring Felix Edinborough for National Literacy Day that features young people reading Sparrow's education badly.
If Cepep has any role in a Trinidad and Tobago so flush with money, it is to create a bridge between the hapless limbo that a wholly inadequate education system left thousands of our young people lost in and a world of knowledge work that basically has no use for them.
I don't sneer at people who work with their hands. Anyone who has seen me paint a wall knows that I have no basis to look down on a craftsman who is good at their job. If Cepep was training a lost generation to be craft entrepreneurs, building a skill base that would build the infrastructure that is springing up all around us, that would be one thing. The Government's Auditors who have found scandalous waste in the Cepep financial procedures and the promises of a Prime Minister who wants to extend a band-aid into an everlasting crutch suggest something far less desirable.
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