Current system letting students, parents down

STRUCTURAL and curriculum reforms at lower levels of the education system have established a foundation that will shatter the dreams of children in public schools.
Elementary schools were introduced in the absence of a proper curriculum and a sufficient number of trained teachers.
Many elementary school students in public schools just sing Christian songs all day.
Some elementary students graduate without being able to understand the difference between a ‘tree’ and ‘three’. They’re often taught in three languages – English, Tok Pisin and the local vernacular – which seems progressive but it’s done in an unsystematic way.
And then the children move on to Grade 3, leaving the teachers at that level to pick up the pieces.
What used to be community or primary schools were rebranded ‘top-up primary’, meaning they were permitted to continue to grades 7 and 8 and take students from other primary schools.
Prior to the ‘reform’, these students would sit a competitive national Grade 6 examination to graduate into high schools – and they were taught by teachers trained at that level.
Since the ‘reform’, the Grade 6 examinations are no more.
What the so-called reform did was to allow primary teachers to instruct at grades 7 and 8, which used to be the province of trained high school teachers.
This was the beginning of a new learning experience for both teachers and students. Increasing enrolments as a result of the government’s ‘tuition fee free’ policy led to a shortage of classroom space as well as learning materials.
So the ill-trained, ill-equipped grade 8 teachers do what they can.
They have a deadline to meet and so the students graduate are left to the Grade 9 teachers in secondary schools who are expected to pick up the pieces.
There is another trend. While new graduates from government sanctioned teachers’ colleges go through stringent selection processes, over the last five years a number of new colleges came into existence in the highlands provinces.
These training colleges recruit Grade 10 and 12 drop outs, some of them who left school more than 10 or 20 years ago.
The primary schools have a habit of allocating new teaching graduates to the lower grades, 3, 4 and 5 so these educationally malnourished graduates end up teaching lower grades.
You can imagine what kind of students are being turned out.
It is doing injustice to innocent children and their parents.
The government, through the national and provincial education authorities, are at least partly responsible for not detecting and improving such an anomaly in the system.

Bomai D Witne, Via email