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- Saturday 12, February-2005 by Donna Sealy

Orlando Marville: Do away with education ministry and 11-plus.


IF NEWLY-APPOINTED Senator Orlando Marville had his way, there would be no Ministry of Education and no 11-Plus Exam.

The schools would be run by principals and a board, with a team of education experts to advise a ministerial team that would monitor education, and there would be continuous assessment for the transfer of students from one level of school to another.

“Instead of the bureaucracy that we have that understands little about education for Independence, we should create a body of experts from the various areas of education including financing education, educational psychology, science education, language, sport, music and other branches of education,” he said.

They in turn would advise the minister on what was required for it to develop, he said, as he addressed yesterday’s audience at the Democratic Labour Party’s weekly lunch-time lecture at George Street.

Speaking on Education And Independence, Marville said Barbados had copied “willy-nilly the system of a foreign coloniser” without asking what the outcome would be for the population.

The former ambassador to Brussels added that his board would take religious education and home economics off the curriculum and leave them to be taught in churches, mosques, temples or synagogues and the home, respectively.

What he would do would introduce civics with basic economics, governance, African studies and entrepreneurship “right from the beginning”.

Saying the Common Entrance Exam, or the 11-Plus, as it was commonly called, was an “abomination” and was based on “an elitist British tool for differentiating between the haves and the have-nots,” the senator said that in its present state it was not what Errol Barrow had intended when he made education free for all.

Urging the audience to think of the realities of the exam, he said there were only “four or five good schools”.

“To argue that there are all equally good secondary schools in Barbados would be to mask the fact that practically no one would choose to go to St Lucy Secondary over Harrison College or Combermere.

“The opportunity for success at the last two is infinitely greater. What the 11-Plus does is to create a competition for places at these good schools,” Marville said. He added that when the competition was over about 70 per cent of the students discovered they had to be part of the “underclass”.

The senator said people usually countered the arguments against the exam by saying that “so and so went to Ellerslie”, but he asked how many of those students won Scholarships, were political leaders of Barbados, heads of the legal or medical professions, businesses or ambassadors.

He also said that co-education had failed children miserably.

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