A Brief Historical Sketch
 

The high school system in Jamaica dates back to 1879. Its history can be conveniently divided into three periods — (a) 1879 to 1911, (b) 1912 to 1943 and (c) 1944 to the present. King has done an excellent study of the formative period, 1879 to 1911. No study has so far been done on the period 1912 to 1943. This paper attempts in a modest way to begin to fill some of the gaps in knowledge about this period.

Purpose This study was undertaken to unravel a conundrum. While the number of teachers trained to teach five subjects in grades 7–9 in the schools included in the Reform of Secondary Education Project in Jamaica almost equalled the number of teachers deployed to carry out these instructional responsibilities in those schools, after four years a significant number of the teachers deployed to teach the five subjects in grades 7–9 remained untrained.

The Youth Development Programme of the YMCA in Kingston, Jamaica, has been successful in delivering remedial and continuing education to at-risk boys who have dropped out of the formal school system. What is particularly remarkable about this two-year programme is the very low dropout rate and very high rate of completion among boys who had dropped out of the formal school system. The clear implication is that the YMCA programme has been able to address the needs and aspirations of 12- to 14-year-old boys in ways that the schools have not.

This paper reviews the teacher development programmes and projects implemented in the Caribbean in the 1990s in light of the challenges faced by the countries of the region to reform their education systems. Particular attention is paid to innovations in teacher education and training, continuing professional development of teachers, teacher supervision, and teacher evaluation.

From the outset, both the orientation and biases in this presentation will be made explicit. First, this paper is presented from the perspective of personal knowledge gathered during my engagement with teacher education for over 30 years, and from involvement in efforts over the past 20 years to apply information and communication technology (ICT) to different aspects of teacher education in Jamaica and the Caribbean. It is presented, not from the perspective of the textbook, but from the lessons learned from actual experiences, some of them painful and highly frustrating.

The articles in this book were first presented as papers at EduVision 1 2003, an international conference on teacher education and technology. The conference, which took place in Montego Bay, Jamaica, was hosted by the Institute of Education, University of the West Indies; the Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture; and the Jamaica Teachers Association and was a visible manifestation of a partnership that had long existed.

Within Christendom teaching was an occupation within the religious community for centuries. Up to the Reformation, in the first half of the sixteenth century, very few teachers were not members of the clergy or of convents. The vast majority of teachers were men. This tradition was transferred to the West Indian colonies when schools were first established in this region in the seventeenth century. This inference is largely supported by anecdotal references in historical records.

Educational Reform in the Commonwealth Caribbean comes as Series #54 in the INTERAMER collection of the Organization of American States, which focuses upon social development and education in Latin America and the Caribbean region. The volume is a collection of essays representing “an overview of the educational reforms that have occurred in several of the English-speaking Caribbean countries over the past few years” (p. ix), and is edited by an internationally outstanding and recognized thought leader in education in the Caribbean.