The Purpose of School Part 2

Millions of dollars are pumped into education in St. Kitts every year. It is seen as a necessary investment in the future of the nation, but something is wrong if we are unable to assess the returns on our investments. Something is wrong with investing millions into any project, no manner how small, without being able to point to evidence of satisfactory returns.
 Relative to the millions pumped into educating our young people, what percentage of these young people go on to  become productive, contributing citizens of the country? What percentage fall through the cracks, and what percentage go on to cost the taxpayers more millions by  being shuttled in and out of the incarceration system. Do we know? Do we care to know?
  This is where the school comes in. This is where I see the school as being pivotal to  ensuring that the community  gains and not lose from investments into  its central nervous system, which I see as the education system of any country.
 I see the school as the nerve center of the nation, and if the nervous system is malfunctioning, then woe be unto any such society.
 We must guard against the slightest tendency to see education, not as  a key component of society on a whole, but catering to individuals as distinct and separate entities in a nation. We think that the individual must try to make use of his educational opportunities, and if he does not, well, too bad for him.
 I say too bad for the nation, because every single child is a neuron in the electrical impulse system of the nation, and one misfiring neuron is dangerous, disruptive and costly to the entire nation. When we see this as being so, we will stop leaving so much of the child's right to learn up to him and his parents and demand more from them all.
 It is a tantamount to being a criminal offence to squander other people's money, to vandalize school premises, to  not turn up for classes for which tax payers pay, to disrupt other students who are willing to learn, and to not turn up for examinations sponsored by taxpayers on some glib and frivolous excuse, and then governments are forced to do all sorts of acrobatics to find ways of keeping you out of trouble because you were permitted to waste your time at school.
No society is perfect and no form of education system could ever, on its own, generate well regulated societies, but something is wrong when an education system takes an innocent infant into its preschool at age three, and by the time he leaves school at age sixteen he is already  a guilty criminal. The education system would have permitted too many things to go unaddressed from the earliest stages of that child's life.
 The system needs to find ways of addressing the needs of children with problems. No child who is failing should simple be shuttled into classes which are essentially the education conveyor belt to incarceration. If a child shows early that he does not know how to work with others, he is violent and self-centered, he is uncooperative, disruptive and disgusting, his mainstream learning should be interspersed with  specialized instructions aimed at addressing and fixing those tendencies in the child, even to the point of looking into the home situations with the aim of dealing with these feeder-tendencies which are generated via families. But no, we do not see this as part of the responsibility of the education system, nevertheless I say it had better be if we want ordered societies.
 But alas we are not sufficiently serious to look again at how we can tweak our education systems to meet our social needs. We prepare people to be workers, not persons. We spend money on computers, not the trained psychologists who specialize in understanding the minds of children, shaping their behaviors, bringing out their humanity, instilling right attitudes in the place where doing so could be life altering and positive, since the longest period of time the child has at home is during the summer vacation. Children spend a lot of time at school. This is what schools are for. We prefer, instead, to let things remain as they are because  it is like taking a credit card to the store. We feel that we can spend, and spend and spend, because we do not feel the dollars being sucked from our pockets, just as we cannot feel damaged lives going on to damage our entire society after falling through the holes in our educational institution's pants pockets.