Can There Be Justice for All in Education?

Despite decades of investment in education in Jamaica, there is still a severe lack of access to a quality education for students in Jamaica’s marginalized inner-city communities. This reality is not limited to the Jamaican context. Poor students living in poor communities anywhere in the world just seem to always have limited access to the quality teaching and learning environment that could help to improve their longterm outcomes. However, if the truth be told, some of these students are able to overcome the challenges related to a less than adequate educational environment when there is strong parental support.

But, educational deficiencies from one generation just seem to spill over into the next, and the next, and the next, and after a few decades , even loving parents become frustrated as they find that they are unable to provide the educational support needed by their children even in the early years. Imagine the loss to a child when a parent is illiterate and is therefore not able to read to his child. We can try to blame the parent, but what if the parent(s) of that parent were also illiterate?

When there is a high percentage of poorly educated citizens in a community or a society, there are outcomes that can be potentially devastating. For example, poorly educated youth who cannot find gainful employment may turn to crime. Maybe it is time for an affirmative action-type approach to early childhood education in marginalized inner-city communities. Among other things, this approach would seriously consider parental capacity to support their children’s educational outcomes and implement measures to provide extra assistance for those students whose parents have serious educational challenges.

The problem, however, is that we live in a world with limited resources, and giving more to the poor oftentimes means taking away from the abundance of the well-to-do. And, the people making the decisions are the well-to-do, those with the means. For there to be greater equity and justice in our educational systems, individuals will be called upon to give up some of the privileges and benefits to which they have become accustomed and to which they feel entitled. This is a knotty problem.

In the interim, those of us who have empty nests and who are not competing for limited educational resources could do well to give back to some of the most vulnerable among us. After all, it does take a village, albeit a virtual village, to raise a child.