Re: Elite vs. Dumps, Thomas calls out inequality in education system
Jomo Thomas deserves not just applause but action. What he has stated so clearly is that we sort our children by status and label it as merit. This is one of the most damaging lies our society keeps telling itself, forty-seven years after we were supposed to have broken free from the logic of colonialism.
Let’s be honest about what this system really does. When we take the “best 100” boys and girls and funnel them solely into the Grammar School and the Girls’ High School, we are not finding the most capable young minds in this nation. We are recognizing the children who had the most support before they ever took that exam tutoring, books, and parents who had the time and money to invest. We are rewarding inherited advantages and disguising them as individual success. That is not meritocracy. That is colonialism with a local twist.
The colonial classroom was never meant to produce leaders from the colonized population. It was designed to create a small, manageable group of administrators loyal, and educated just enough to be useful, selected from families already in power. We changed the flag but did not change the filter. The child born into poverty in a rural area, who may be the smartest mind of her generation, is still placed in an underfunded school without a science lab and assigned a teacher who is there due to the continuing practise of the peter principal of management. A practice that permeates across all aspects of the employment spectrum therefore, failing upwards. instead of a true calling. Even if you are pass the benchmark as an educator. The question is? Are you just teaching memorization or critical thinking.. We have merely replaced the British overseer with a local bureaucracy that maintains the same hierarchy.
Thomas is also right that the system produces the very failures it then blames on students. When an intelligent young person is transferred and “dumped” his word, and the right one into a school that society has already given up on, that young person receives a message as clear as any report card: you do not matter here. The disengagement and defiance that follow are not character flaws. They are reasonable reactions to being abandoned by the system. We created these conditions and then criminalize the responses.
The solution is not complicated, even if it is politically challenging. We must stop placing qualified, subject-specialist teachers in elite schools and begin sending them to where they are most needed. We need to end the practice of putting salary earners instead of (Teachers) in classrooms as a form of welfare. We must invest in science labs, libraries, and learning resources in every school, not just as good to have, But as a must have. To the less fortunate as a basic requirement of a functioning national education system. Parents from the underfunded schools should hold their representative accountable.
Your taxes after all, payes their salaries.
Jomo Thomas has voiced what many already know but too few have dared to say publicly. The question now is whether we have the courage to take action or if we will continue passing down the same colonial classroom to another generation of children who deserve so much better.