The Five Year Plan

All flashbacks to the Soviet Russia segment of my GCSE History aside Elvin James' announcement that we can expect the Government education plan for the next five years in March is very good news.

After two major reports and years of passing the blame it looks like we're finally moving forward in education. The adoption of the Cambridge curriculum this year is a promising step and I'm hopeful we'll hear of a number of other initiatives when the full plan is announced. As for raising the school leaving age that's a completely different story. All it will do is prove the old adage: "You can lead a horse to water but, you can't make it drink". The proposal has it's heart in the right place but, it's going to take a lot more than just legislating it in order for it to actually make a difference.

Of course there is only so much that the government can do to fix the public education system. The Hopkins report was quite clear in it's criticisms and since then the government has moved forward on a number of its suggestions. The recent Mincy report's issues however are a little big harder to deal with. Of course it does offer some suggested initiatives that could help but, in the end those particular problems are societal and there's little hope of them being solved without a lot of community input. Given Bermuda's record when it comes to wide spread community involvement I'm going to let the cynic in me rule for now but, I live in hope that I'll soon be proved wrong.

Obviously since the plan hasn't been released yet it's impossible to comment on the proposals but, all the seem even this news is good news. At this point what needs to be done should be reasonably clear, while we may not know how to fix the whole problem we can at least fix part of it. Given the past record on education it's easy to dismiss the plan before it's even been announced but, perhaps since I'm in a good I'll permit myself a little bit of,

Wishful Thinking