The Purpose of School Part 1

Kittitians are very good at recognizing opportunities and making use of them. If there is one thing a Kittitian can see clearly from a distance is when an opportunity for gain is available. There is nothing evil about that, it is a gift which nearly every Kittitian possesses. It is, however, one thing to recognize and go after an opportunity, and another thing to understand how to make maximum use of it once it is in the hand.
This is one of the Kittitian's largest difficulties. We do not seem to understand that we must maximize our opportunities. We receive opportunities, yes, but after this we appear simply not to know what next to do.
 In St. Kitts, for example, free, compulsory education is available to every child up to age sixteen, and Kittitians boast (correctly so) of how academically well a high percentage of these children do, but after they have completed their education at age sixteen, seventeen and sometimes eighteen years old, too many of these young people who have had years of free education find themselves living in a world for which their education has not adequately equipped them. Their heads are filled to the brim with answers to examination questions about  the correct number of voyages undertaken by Christopher Columbus, the names of Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century treaties such as the Treaty of Versailles and others, but if these school leavers get jobs as tour guides in their own country which is now heavily reliant on tourism, they still have to take crash courses in History about the country in which they were born, raised and schooled.
 Knowing the names of the three ships on which Columbus sailed, and the names of  the British antislavery movements, along with the work of persons such as Wilberforce will not help  when they are tossed in at the deep end with a growing pool of  visitors  they are expected to take on guided tours through towns brimming with a rich history, a history with which not even their teachers are familiar.
This is simply symbolic of the inadequacies in an education system that is so old that it creaks with irrelevance. Of course some patchwork has been done to it across the Caribbean. A little computer knowledge has been plastered into the cracks in the curriculum; the students now sit Caribbean Examinations in Accounts, Principles of Business, and nowadays even Physical Education, but this is like pumping new wine into old wineskins which will soon crack, making the wine either absolutely useless or woefully inefficient.
 We still suffer through an education system built for colonial masters and their children. Our longest vacation is still called summer holidays, as though we encounter any other season here, and these said same summer vacation periods are still as long as it took the child of the colonial master to return to his colony-based school in the Caribbean when summer is ending in Europe and winter is about to set in.