Recognizing the need to develop the nation’s human resources with some considerable haste the concern is where does the education system go from here.
With an increasing number of children attaining school age both primary and secondary the problem of where to put them becomes more pressing and solutions are being considered, especially the question more schools or bigger schools.

One of the issues however drawing the most attention and debate is the concept of Universal Secondary Education (U.S.E.).
Proponents of this idea believe that every child has a right to a secondary education and should not have to pass any exam to qualify for it.
In fact there are evidently moves on to abolish the Common Entrance altogether and make attendance in a secondary school a natural stage of each child’s education.
This concept also has it opponents who argue that some children are just not secondary school material and would therefore complicate things for the more academic students, wasting their time and putting more pressure on the school administration.
The call by this section therefore is for a more diversified education; one in which an individual’s ability and inclination can be detected early and he/she is then guided along that path.
More technical institutions will then be necessary as this is an area sadly deficient in the present dispensation.
In the mind of many the whole curriculum needs revisiting with the objective of making it more relevant to our present and future needs as a country.
Of course this calls for co-ordination among different departments of government and more than that it calls for long term and comprehensive developmental planning, something else we seem to be short on.
The revised curriculum would therefore reflect the projected human resource needs to satisfy these long term objectives.
Do we have leaders who have leaders now or would we have in the near future who are bold enough to upset the apple cart? Leaders willing to eschew the education system that our colonizers left behind to ensure that we remain docile and subservient to them? Leaders who would opt for rather a system that takes our own development needs into account while respecting and preserving our history and culture and instilling national pride?
However back to what to do with the present students and those that are becoming eligible for secondary school by droves each year.
Some irate souls, teachers included fume that passing Common Entrance is not based on whether one performs well but on how many spaces are available in the secondary schools.
The decision to be madeinvolves an option between more secondary schools and mega schools. It seems that a mega school experiment is taking place at the Westerhall Secondary School where facilities to house an additional 300 plus students are being added and apparently the government has conceded that this is the way to go.
But a phenomenon that the Ministry of Education is still trying to explain has surfaced. While the secondary school population is increasing at an inexorable pace there seems to be a decline in the population of most primary schools.
An official of the ministry said there are some schools especially in the rural areas where most of the classrooms are under populated
Asked what the reason is for this development the official said there has been no scientific research into the issue but they suspect one of the reasons could be that people are beginning to control the size of their families.
Whatever the reason, ministry official said our primary school classrooms seem to be emptying at an alarming rate while secondary school qualifiers are multiplying.
The senior staffer sought to rationalize the government’s decision to decide on the mega school option.
He said scattering schools all over the place will require acquiring new locations, additional principals and staff hence a whole new set of administrative and logistic requirements for the ministry.
Merely increasing the size of existing schools will necessitate some more teachers but principal and administrative systems are already in place.
Some thing that it will be better to bring schools to more communities but the question of whether the number of students in each new school will justify the construction of a school is a very valid one.
The opponents of Universal Secondary Education point out that too much stress is placed on the secondary school teachers because of the student material that is being sent to them.
They contend that when a child enters secondary school that child is expected to be of a certain standard and the secondary teachers are sometimes appalled at what the students entering their classrooms do not know.
This many blame on the quality of teachers operating in the classrooms of the primary school many of whom are untrained and inexperienced.
While there are many hardworking, experienced and dedicated teachers who are toiling away at an uphill task under challenging circumstances many others are just going through the motions and several others though willing have not been adequately prepared for the task at hand.
The education of the nation’s future is too important to place in the hands of untrained and unwilling persons, people reason, citing the number of IMANI workers who are now actually teaching in classrooms around the nation.
In fact many of the teachers who have gone off to Teachers’ College have been replaced by IMANI workers rather than someone more qualified and experienced filling the temporary position.
Everyone understands the telling blow that was dealt to the physical structure of the education system by hurricane Ivan and that it took and is still taking a great deal of financial and technical resources to resuscitate.
There is nothing however preventing the long term planning of the non-physical structure of the new education system taking into account the projected human resource needs of the future.
Then arises the question of incentives for keeping our trained people here after they would have acquired their expertise rather than being lured away to be gobbled up by more developed countries which offers more opportunities.
Adequate compensation therefore must be a major part of any planning process to ensure that the skills and training that people acquire stay here for the development of our country