A newspaper article yesterday on the violence at Chaguanas North Secondary School, “Rehab for 20 ‘deviant’ pupils” states: “Minister in the Ministry of Education Dr Lovell Francis said that Guidance Counsellors advised that there was a direct correlation between the literacy and numeracy levels of the pupils and their misbehaviour. He disclosed that some of the pupils had severe problems with reading at the primary level.” These pupils are aged 13-17.
The article cites the Minister as saying trained psychologists will be working with them to help them “understand self and make better choices in life.” If you are without literacy, what are the choices available to you?
If you are without reading and writing skills and bombarded daily at school with tasks that require reading and writing, you do need psychological help to recover from this battering to your self-esteem.
But, what you would need most of all is to learn to read and write. Hopefully the psychologists can open them up to accepting literacy instruction and effective, specialist instruction can be provided for them.
For the past eight years, NALIS has contracted ALTA to conduct the Youth Lit programme at the 10 libraries where space is available for an after-school literacy class.
Fifteen years on from the declaration of universal secondary education in the year 2000, secondary schools have no effective programme to address students’ literacy challenges. This is the same for the many skills training programmes who receive these students when they fail at secondary school.
Thirty years on from my days teaching non-readers in Forms 4 and 5 at a Senior Comp, I can say that ALTA has improved the literacy of some 10,000 adults. The literacy of the parent is a key factor in the literacy of the child. Consider the case of one of ALTA’s early students whose grandchild achieved a place in a first-choice school at SEA a few years ago.
Paula Lucie-Smith,
ALTA Founder