Campus Principal, Dr. Bhoendradatt Tewarie, expressed the views that to increase the number of achievers in a society was not to lower the bar of achievement, but to improve the support infrastructure to enable more to achieve higher standards.

Speaking at the recent Awards Ceremony to mark the 25th Anniversary of the San Fernando Secondary Comprehensive School, Dr. Tewarie said another way of increasing achievers was “to measure, evaluate and give value to a broader range of talents and skills which are abundantly evident in our society.”

Said Dr. Tewarie: “As educators, you will undoubtedly agree that we cannot afford to compromise our standards of performance and achievement. In this regard, it is particularly heartening to see the steady improvement in the results of this school so that, a quarter of a century after it was founded, its achievements across the board—in the number of students passing the CXC examinations, in the field of music and sports, in areas of national importance such as Agricultural Sciences—are noteworthy.

“These benchmarks set a standard by which all schools may be judged. They remind us that excellence in education cannot be confined to any one area, if the individual student is to be well-educated and able to perform effectively in the wider society and if we are to acknowledge the many talents that human beings possess.”

According to Dr. Tewarie, societies needed institutions in order to strengthen themselves and in order to forge ahead in development.

“That is why in many countries, at various stages of development, the emphasis is on institution building and institutional strengthening. Without strong institutions, a society will not progress with certainty. The institutional arrangements in a society form part of the infrastructure of governance and often, deliver goods and services to the citizens of that society.

“When a society does not have capable institutions, sometimes even money cannot help it. For instance, one of the problems with Haiti, the poorest country in our hemisphere, is that the institutional infrastructure does not exist in the society at the level required to receive and absorb large amounts of financial aid and it is almost impossible to translate money into manageable projects which can be sustained over time, even when the money is available. This phenomenon is not limited to Haiti, it is typical of countries where institutional capacity is limited, and support infrastructure weak,” said Dr. Tewarie.

Dr. Tewarie felt, however, that perhaps the most important set of institutions in a society were educational institutions.

“The reason for that is because educational institutions provide the feedstock for further education as well as the human resources for all other institutions in society, public, private and community. So educational institutions are crucial, vital, because all sectors depend on the educational sector for the vital human resources that they need. From corporate executive to trade union leader, educational institutions are brokers to the social order.

“That is why leadership and management of our educational institutions are so important. In a field such as education, inevitably there are levels of leadership and management that must co-exist and are required to co-exist. We need leadership and management to map out the policy direction. We need leadership and management to work out the plans that will make the policy implementable. And we need leadership and management on the ground, in the institution, in the school to ensure that what needs to happen, happens; what needs to be done is done and this requires, within the framework of policy as well as plan, a certain degree of autonomy so that the institution can be responsive and flexible and agile in the context of stakeholder needs,” said the Principal.

These stakeholders he identified as the students, the parents, the communities, the higher educational institutions, the private industry and the state institutions and the Ministry of Education.

He also underscored the point that the school building was not the institution.

“The buildings are necessary to provide reasonable conditions for teaching and learning and other support activities to take place. But an institution is more than its buildings. Indeed people, relationships, process, structure, systems, culture (and often these go beyond the walls of any institution) are essential elements of institution building. And this is where leadership, management, vision and impactful action are all critical.

“That is why I have spoken and written, on many occasions, about a learning community as the basis for a learning society. And in this day and age where there is a general consensus that we live in a globalizing knowledge society with a knowledge driven economy, the concept of learning communities as essential ingredients in the creation of a learning society is absolutely fundamental. It is also important to understand the implications of a knowledge society and economy for any society and its institutions, because any society without adequate learning capacity will be left back in this knowledge driven, competitive world. Learning societies, therefore, are those which seek to build institutions that rally learning communities around them.

“The lesson for us then, is not only that we must transform our schools and other educational institutions to learning communities, but that all our institutions, whatever their mission, must establish at their centre a capacity to promote learning and nurture an information sharing and knowledge diffusion culture, if they are to progress at the rate required for our age,” said Dr. Tewarie.