What kind of teaching are our children geting?

A debate is raging in Dominica over Universal Secondary Education (USE).Underlying most of the issues we raise in this respect is a fundamental question: What kinds of children are we getting into the school system? To me, the larger question is, what kinds of children did we expect to get when we spent generations keeping their parent, grandparents and great grandparents out of school or shortchanging them through labels?

It is easy to blame the voiceless- those who cannot defend themselves and children by nature of who they are, will always be defenseless against adults. It's easy to see them as the problem forgetting that "a bad workman still blames his tool" but the purpose here is not to blame but to establish the forum for rethinking and reflecting on how we prepare the generation who will take over from us, govern and manage and who will be in charge of our lives and our welfare. We have no control over the natural progression. We age, we retire, they take over. What have we taught them about civility and intergenerational responsibility, and accountability when we have not held or willing to hold ourselves accountable for what happens to the them and we wonder why we are at pain to find the next generation of leaders?

We gloat about pass marks and percentages not realizing that what matters is competence - the ability to be good at whatever one does, despite what it is. Therefore, an even larger question is, what kind of teaching are our children getting? Notice I did not say teachers because how students come to know is no longer confined and increasingly so, to the classroom. The School of Continuing Studies, Dominca and UWI Open campus like many institutions worldwide are making teachers redundant thriugh distance learning, especially past high school, and many students whom we once thought would not get far are online moving ahead while we battle about who should be admitted into our high schools. And to think members of the media are at the forefront of that crusade is shameful, and is reflective of a desperate attempt to cling to days long gone - a pre-Obama age, I call it.

Education as the result of selective criteria is over and we have to deal with it. Accessibility and networks is what is important and disconnected people are out of touch and out of the loop. A friend was surprised to find me on Facebook; another scoffed that he did not have the time, and I run into some lecturers of mine who do not even want to have a conversation about online or distance education. I was pleased when I saw of them working hard to come to terms with his IPhone. He had just gotten it, he said. He understood the world that was mushrooming around him.

I can travel anywhere in the world and have a meeting with my advisor using Cisco's WebEx that furnishes both audio and video communication, whiteboard, document sharing and ability to make a presentation as if I were in a boardroom, all from my laptop. Move over office space and supervisors intent on supervising people rather than work.

The question then is what kind of teaching are our children getting rather than what kind of children are our teachers getting. I would hope since we all are different, teachers would come to work expecting to get all kinds of Dominican children.