Maziki Thame | Education for a better Jamaica

Many Jamaicans are deeply concerned and are therefore engaged in a debate about our need to build a better society. We may not all agree on what that society should look like, but many believe the need exists. As we celebrate Education Week, we might reflect on how education can create a better place for all. As such, we ask: What should education look like, and what is its value for 21st-century life?

Our teachers called for us to wear black in solidarity with them from April 27 to 28. They called for safe schools and mental health support in a system where they feel overworked and undervalued. In a good system, this would not be so. The PNP believes that signals from the top must demonstrate that the nation sees teachers as among our most valuable resources and the cornerstone of a good system.

Today, the education system is deeply unequal, even apartheid-like. It produces high levels of failure and feeds the structure of a low-skilled, low-wage economy, where there is high informality, including illicit and violent activities. There is a cycle here that needs to be broken. The education system reproduces economic and social injustice.

We can only break this cycle when we create an education system that is different, one that generates new modes of learning and critical understandings that prepare us for a modern world and to fix the problems we face as a nation. We must do the work of improving educational outcomes to create a more just socio-economic order.

VALUE OF EDUCATION

We live in a society where there are different views on education and its role. Some see it primarily as a route to jobs, individual achievement, and social mobility. But the value of education goes far beyond how certification might secure employment. It ought to be seen as a common good, a necessary process to hone and shape critical intelligence for life, for survival, fairness, and thriving for all.

In Jamaica, education is critical to decolonisation, where a foundational problem to be tackled is society-wide anti-Black sentiment. I visited a rural school recently and saw written on a bathroom stall door the words that a child was “ugly n black”. In this 21st century, over 60 years after political Independence, statements like this can still appear.

Recognising the continuing devaluing of Blackness in Jamaica, the 2025 PNP Manifesto promised to embed the teachings of Garveyism in the school curriculum. Teaching Garveyism is one way to give ourselves, as a people, a path to recognising that we have contributed in many ways to the world of human achievement and that we are worthy of pride.

Education is also a powerful tool through which to counter anti-social tendencies in our society. It can nurture the kind of ideas that enable society to reject lenses such as ‘bad mind’ as a way to assess reality, and to challenge the resignation to social inequality, tolerance of corruption, and the normalisation of interpersonal and state violence. Education has the potential to engender the will to create a just society.

PROMOTING EDUCATION FOR ALL

In an effort to democratise education by promoting meritocracy, Premier Norman Manley established the Common Entrance Examination in 1957. Prior to this, secondary schools administered their own exams and gave places to those who could pay. Under the new system, if you could make the grade, you could have a future.

Merit, however, has always been mediated by class and other social differences. Children have unequal access to resources such as books, technology, play areas, meals, small class sizes, special-needs teachers, assistance with homework, quiet spaces for study at home, and second chances. All these factors affect their potential for success.

Even with Norman Manley’s reforms, students at private, fee-paying preparatory schools outperformed those who attended free primary schools, thus limiting most children’s access to quality education. This has remained a factor in reproducing inequality. The education system must account for how resource differences affect children’s success. The major goal of the State must be to level up the quality of schools to address these disparities.

VALUING JAMAICAN LANGUAGE

A critical fix needed in Jamaican education is improving literacy as a foundation for all learning. Experts have repeatedly told the nation that the Jamaican language must be used to improve outcomes in English. The Language Competence Survey 2007, undertaken by UWI’s Jamaican Language Unit, reported that only 46.6 per cent of respondents demonstrated bilingualism, with the majority being monolingual and more than a third of these being Jamaican speakers. In a show of commitment to advancing Jamaicans, the PNP committed in its 2025 manifesto to recognising Jamaican dialect as a cultural language and teaching English as a second language where needed.

Among the ways to improve literacy is fostering a love of reading in society. In schools, this means building time for reading, reflection, and exploration of curiosity into the curriculum. That also means less teaching to the test. The Primary Exit Profile exams have ensured that from as early as grade four, teachers must narrow how learning is measured and delivered, risking a well-rounded education.

The potential of education is limitless. We ought not to restrict it to preparing people for the job market, especially not the existing one. It is a means of building our people’s capacity to create a different, more equal, and just society.

Dr Maziki Thame is a senator and the People’s National Party deputy spokesperson on education.