This has been extremely hard to write. It began as an account of my experience teaching in a public school. But that experience was driven by the problems in the education system, which is part and parcel of the overall government miasma created and supported by the community at large. The result is a four-part series.
In 1961, I became credentialed in California as a secondary math and science teacher. Until 1968, when I came to the Virgin Islands, I taught junior high school, college and university mathematics.
This fall, when the Education Department publicized its dire straits regarding a shortage of math and science teachers, I signed up to substitute teach. I ended up working a two-week stint in the classroom.
During those two weeks immersed in the educational system, I found the following:
1. Students are affected by the morale of the teachers, and it is not good.
2. Students are having a difficult time living up to their potential, because of the well-established lack of community commitment to excellence in education.
3. Students have been taught to socialize, rather than to learn.
4. Teachers are extremely angry and living to retire, or beaten down and living to retire. Bottom line: Their morale is awful (See No. 1).
5. Regardless of how poorly they are treated, the administration and faculty rise to the occasion and work very hard. Considering that a fully qualified beginning teacher is paid about the same as a police or fire cadet, and only half that of a publicist, we are getting much more than we pay for.
When the students in one of my classes became too rambunctious for teaching to be effective, I began searching for support. I approached the school counselor, and she immediately gave me the information I requested. When I asked the school nurse for help with a sleeping student, she determined he was watching television until the early morning and contacted his parents. When I informed the department chair and front office that I had a discipline problem, the chair and one of the office managers appeared in my classes and told the students some facts of life I wasn't culturally prepared to broach. Finally, both the principal and the campus police came by my room to observe and lend their support.
That is teamwork like I have never experienced before. These people care and work hard.
The problems at the student level are the school facility itself, supplies and their fellow students. In this climate, we need air-conditioned classrooms. Schools throughout the mainland are air-conditioned, heated or both; why are we still teaching under the tree, so to speak? We need toilets that work and that are furnished with toilet paper and paper towels. Teachers need scratch paper, scissors and other instruments.
The only way a class can ever carry out any type of activity is when all the implements are provided, as it is enough to expect many students to show up with their textbooks. Middle and upper schools need student lockers for the storage of books and personal items. One reason we don't have the supplies is that when provided, they are quickly stolen; therefore, why provide them?
It is obvious many of our children don't want to be in school, don't respect the school system, and don’t have any compunctions about vandalizing school property.
General education teachers should be expected to work only with students committed to schooling. The idea that a student can come from the cane fields of another island straight to middle school is absurd. Teaching a student how to hold a pencil is not a secondary school teaching skill. Teaching children who have never seen their father is difficult; teaching those who don’t interact with either a father or a mother is extremely difficult. A child who has been literally abandoned to school requires a Herculean amount of time, patience and understanding. Prisoners do not have any business jangling their leg bracelets throughout the school.
Are there solutions to these problems? Yes, but not easy ones. We can begin with the number of children in our society.
1. Appeal the late Judge Almeric Christian’s historic decision mandating the education of any child who walks through the doors of a Virgin Islands school. (This effort should garner the support of such states as Texas and California, whose educational systems were adversely impacted by Christian's decision.)
2. Cut all tax subsidies to parents for children. If a family wants children and can afford them, no problem. Instead of giving parents more tax deductions for having more children, the government should impose additional taxes for additional children, and thus generate revenues to assist in educating those children.
3. Crank up the "Deadbeat Dads" program. The state should not be expected to house and feed baby factories such as the Nazareth emergency housing mother of six in her ‘20s who demanded public housing and food stamps. All babies have fathers; it is a fact of nature. Mothers must name the fathers, who must support the children along with the working mothers. Otherwise, the children should be put up for adoption; if the mother does not know the father, she is obviously an unfit parent.
4. Further educate our entire community with regard to the responsibilities and costs of raising children. We no longer make babies to provide industrialists with cheap labor. African-Americans are no longer slaves encouraged to father children to add to the enslaved workforce. (Note: African-Americans on the mainland are rapidly approaching zero-base population growth, with a current reproduction rate of 1.03. The population expansion of our country today is attributed to Hispanics whose religious practices have doomed their South American and Caribbean homelands, encouraging them to flock to the United States to find economic relief.
As long as we continue to produce more children than we can care for, educate and employ; we will continue to ship our children off island while watching our economy falter and strangle. White and black North Americans and northern Europeans have restricted their population growth by choice. The Russians’growth has been restricted by choice and environmental pollution. The Chinese population growth is restricted by law and mandated surgery. In the Virgin Islands, our people are beginning to accept their responsibility; we need to accelerate this acceptance.
Census figures indicate that for the last 30 years the Virgin Islands has had more inhabitants under 21 years of age than 21 and over. We must embrace quality rather than quantity. Only 25 percent of our population should be under 20 years of age. A man should be proud of being a husband with a loving family where his child is successfully learning and preparing for future opportunities. A woman should be proud of living in a loving family with a child born out of love and respect. Both parents should be committed to seeing that their child receives a quality education that will prepare that child to optimize his or her life. With smaller school populations comprising more highly motivated students, we should be able to provide the facilities and teachers necessary for quality education. But will our governmental system support quality education?
Next: Empowering teachers to teach
