by Simon
•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind
who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published
every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at
frontporchguardian@gmail.com.
There is a sustained and critical national dialogue on the state and direction of Bahamian education, most intensely as regards primary through secondary education in our public school system.
Success in reforming public education will be achieved through pragmatic solutions, borrowing ideas from across the ideological spectrum while challenging those including, sometimes, union leaders opposed to reforms such as merit pay, and more testing of and review of tenure standards for teachers.
Success will require a broad rethinking by political leaders, the education bureaucracy and parents as to how schools are run, the quality of in-school leadership and what a truly magnet school system may look like in New Providence and Grand Bahama.
But success will be stymied by ideological fantasies as typified in a letter to the press by the president of a local think-tank, which proposed a single thread-bare argument producing this logical fallacy and tautological disaster: public education is a failure because, well, it’s public education, or the equivalent of teaching little Johnnie and Jenny that the sky is blue, because the sky is blue.
