Attempts to Improve Education in the Caribbean are a Scam

By Ajonté Josiah

Education has been at the forefront of the news in recent weeks, with Governments across the Caribbean engaging in various agreements to improve the state of education in the region. The Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) is the education cornerstone for most English-speaking Caribbean. For many Caribbean countries, CXC provides the primary exams students take to prove their readiness for tertiary education and employment. These exams include the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE). Having gone through the education system in Antigua and Barbuda and having taken both CSEC and Cape exams, I, like many others, believe that many issues must be addressed.

While my academic journey has allowed me to attend Columbia University in New York City, it was littered with challenges. Firstly, there is a significant shortage of teachers in the region. I saw this firsthand in my country of Antigua and Barbuda, where students were left without a teacher in particular subject areas for months in an academic year. Another challenge is the outdated syllabi still being taught in schools. This issue is more evident in technological subjects like CSEC Information Technology, where students, such as myself, were and are still being taught the programming language Pascal, which has been outdated since the 1980s when alternatives like Python existed.

Moreover, the stark education inequality in the region adds itself to the mix. While this issue is not exclusive to the Caribbean, it is a significant barrier for many students. While some schools struggle to provide the lab equipment necessary for students to complete required experiments, other schools overflow with resources and perform better in regional exams.

Despite continuous efforts to help students improve their performance, the Caribbean still needs to perform better. While it may be easy to blame everything on the state of education in the region or the lack of opportunities, these issues are merely surface-level. The first step in addressing the problem of education in the Caribbean has always been managing the culture and attitudes towards education in the region. While many efforts to increase educational collaboration and such nature are great, they are only worthwhile if people take advantage of the opportunities before them. While there is the issue of educational disparity in the region, in instances where opportunities are presented to Caribbean youth, they are usually ignored or underutilized because young people need to see the importance of the opportunity. 

I have worked on a few educational STEM-focused summer camps in Antigua and have had the chance to see firsthand how students interact with these opportunities. For most people, these camps are merely a way to pass the time or meet up with friends. There is no enthusiasm for learning and no sense of urgency to seize an opportunity to bridge the educational gap between the Caribbean and the rapidly developing world. In these instances, the lack of opportunity is not the problem or the lack of resources. The problem lies in our attitude to these opportunities. From the popular songs in the media celebrating “dunceness” or having “no subjects” regarding the state of being ignorant and lacking academic workload, it is no wonder students and young people place no value on educational endeavors both academic and extracurricular.

If we want to improve education in the region, we need to change our culture around education. It should be something that is valued. It should be something seen as worth pursuing. We should be pushing our students to be better and to develop themselves to a caliber that allows them to compete on the global stage, and we cannot keep using our size as an excuse. We have the talent in the region. We have people who are more than capable of great things. But because of our culture and attitude to education, many of the Caribbean’s top prospects pursue education abroad with no intention of returning. We can change education in the Caribbean for the better. I genuinely believe this to be the case. But we must start by changing our attitudes to the opportunities already before us.

Ajonté Josiah is from Antigua and Barbuda and am currently a student at Columbia University.

  Caribbean, education, scam, Teachers