As we look in sorrow at some of what is the news today, we see the evidence all around of yesterday’s neglect; yesterday’s failures; yesterday’s delinquencies; and yesterday’s willful derelictions of duty. How else -we ask rhetorically- does anyone answer the question as to why so many of our youth are caught up in the coils of crime, deviance, and wanton destruction.
We want some one to tell us what is happening in this nation’s schools; and give us some answers why there are so very many near illiterates being ‘graduated’ in today’s Bahamas. There is an urgent need for the Government of The Bahamas to focus on the human capital of our nation today in order to meet the challenges of tomorrow.
In the mean time we can tell you that employers in both the public and private sectors are privy to a number of startling facts concerning this nation’s youthful population. Highest on the list of things most employers know is that there are thousands of young people who leave school barely literate; an often time totally innumerate. As we reflect on the tragedy in this mess of a situation, we take note of the fact that all of this has cost the Bahamian people so very dearly.
How else -we ask- can anyone explain why Bahamians have been getting it wrong for so long. One possibility looms, which is that those who make policy really do not care. And they do not care because their children are not obliged to be schooled in the public system.
But today, we have news for them.
Evidence is now coming in to suggest that the rot and contagion from a decadent and corrupt society have already seeped into some of this nation’s once-best private high schools. A part of the explanation for this is due to, of all things bright and beautiful, the Internet. The nation’s youth are communicating on-line. Their parents and teachers would be astonished and shocked if they had a clue about the kinds of information that is actually being communicated among and between young people.
In one extreme instance, we learned about how any number of young girls and boys were ‘chatting on-line’ with ‘friends’ halfway around the world; and exchanging pornographic images and text. Unfortunately, some of these same people are today embarked on a failure track, and are fated to leave school with their heads filled with inter-net sewerage.
In the mean time, practically no one is taking note.
By the time most of these young people are obliged to hit the streets in search of jobs, it is too late. In desperation, some of them take whatever employment they could get. Others become quite foolish. These are the ones who take to a life of crime; where they maraud with guns; sometimes the very ones that are owned by their frightened parents.
Some of these die young.
Just the other day the news was to the effect that one young man had killed another. And -yet again- just the other day, there was reference to the apparent disjuncture between news concerning hopes for a flood of surging economic progress as a consequence of the launch of any number of large investment projects in The Bahamas.
These two stories speak truth to the fact that there is no automatic connection, or necessary correlation between high and rising rates of economic growth and the well being of the majority of the Bahamian people. Indeed there are times in life when the evidence is abundant that less can sometimes mean more as far as quality of life issues are concerned.
Indeed we do remember -and then most vividly- that time in The Bahamas when money flowed and when-paradoxically- life was a living hell for most people in The Bahamas. This is precisely what was happening in the seventies and eighties in a drugs and death-infested Bahamas.
Many Bahamians -we dare say- lost their lives in that whirlwind.
Two decades later The Bahamas faces another crisis. This time around it involves the children who were mere babes in arms in the midst of that bloody storm. These are the Bahamians who were born to parents who were obliged to deal with a host of problems that were themselves derivatives of the HIV-AIDS epidemic; the gun and drugs scourges; and any number of other devastating social stressors.
Regrettably, practically everyone concerned seems to believe that this silent crisis will evaporate once the right bromides are mouthed; and once the right sounds are made about ‘anger management’. This will not do.
In the ultimate analysis, nothing good comes of anything whose very existence is denied. The silent crisis is real. The Government can and should do something about it, sooner rather than later.
Editorial from The Bahama Journal
