SINCE the recent incident at the Christianburg Secondary School where the head teacher reportedly went against the policy, the issue of automatic promotion in schools has come under sharp focus by those within and even outside the education system. There are strong arguments for and against the policy of automatic promotion.
The strongest one, of course, is the psychological/emotional pressure on children. On the other hand, this policy could demotivate children from the spirit of competition to do better and the standard and quality of education could suffer because children would feel that regardless of whether they do well or poorly, they will be promoted. So why bother to work hard?
The other challenge is the fact that when a child goes into a higher class, he/she will be tasked with more advanced work and his/her ability to cope will depend largely on the mastering of the programme in the previous class because the school’s curriculum is one of continuity.
When a child repeats in a class, he/she may be able to catch up as some children are slow learners and repeating may actually benefit them.
One major reason given by the Ministry of Education for the experimentation with automatic promotion is that a survey has shown that most repeaters end up as school dropouts.
While there may be some correlation between school dropouts and repeating in a class, such a conclusion could be scientifically flawed because there could be several other reasons why these children end up as dropouts, including domestic problems, poverty and broken homes.
What the survey should have determined in a scientific manner are the reasons for school repeaters becoming dropouts because surely there are school dropouts among those children who perform well. The recent Neesa Gopaul tragedy is a typical such case.
Before changes in education policies are made, scientific and methodical studies and research are imperative so that the new policy/policies will be guided correctly and it would appear that in the case of automatic promotion this was not done.
An issue so complex that would have a direct bearing on the future of a child should have been discussed intensively among educators, parents and wider society before a decision to implement or not to implement was made.
What is encouraging though is that the Education Ministry has made it clear that it will review the policy in two years.
However, the long term and ideal solution to deal with poor performers in the school system is to have an all-year round remedial programme in schools which must be compulsory to help those children who are not doing so well, rather than waiting until a child fails annual examinations to address it. In other words there should be a preventative approach where students are prevented from failing perhaps under a slogan of “No failures in the school system.”
Under such a system teachers would need to monitor students more closely and identify their academic weaknesses.
With such a system in place, there would be no failures or an insignificant number of failures and there would be no need to debate whether there should be automatic promotion or not.
But in all of this, parents need to play a more supportive role in their children’s education or else no education system would be very successful. Parents need to understand that their children are at school for only five hours a day and 39 weeks a year and therefore the bulk of their time is spent out of school.
The academic success of children cannot be a teacher-alone affair. It has to be a teacher-parent-society partnership.