In my last two articles I wrote on the rights of the child. I shall now address education in relation to those rights. In my article of July 23, I pointed out that in our present constitution and in the Working Document reference to education under human rights referred only to parents' rights. The Principles of Fairness draft constitution, however, proposed rights of the child and rights to education which could be linked.

An important issue for education in this country is the legal age up to which education is compulsory (12 years). It should also be noted that the legal age for entry into the workforce is 16! Many persons, including myself, have pointed out this absurdity which can be corrected by a minor amendment to the Education Act. This law is to undergo major review but as with many important issues this will take many years. I have previously suggested that the legal age to which education should be compulsory should be raised to 18 to capture those youths who are now involved in gang activity. In any event the population is aging and the retirement age may have to be raised with the consequent raising of the age for entry into the work force.

Already the revision of the Education Act is shrouded in mystery. Last year the Education Discussion Group (EDG) was invited by the Ministry of Education to submit proposals for revision of the Act. We were invited on two occasions to appear before the committee set up to review the Act to discuss our submissions. This year to our astonishment when we expected to receive a revised draft for comment we were sent a draft Education Act of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS)! What this means I can only speculate. Does the Prime Minister's thrust for integration with the OECS mean that in future we will be following the lead of those countries?

While the Constitution can enshrine the right to education this cannot guarantee good quality in the education system or the essential social environment that will allow children to be given and benefit from an education system that allows them to express the potential for creativity that they all possess.

Let us therefore examine the present circumstances in which children are placed to be educated. I shall start at primary school since the comprehensive system on early childhood centres is only now being installed and all praise to the Government for this effort.

I shall first make general statements which are largely derived from discussion with teachers and persons concerned with the education system and then I shall attempt to back these up with such data as are available.

There can be little doubt that the performance at the Secondary Entrance Assessment Examination (SEA) of students from different schools varies greatly. Since there will be random variation in the inherent abilities of any school population this variation in performance must be due to the social environment of the children, the environment of the school or the quality of the teaching.

Let us first consider the physical environment of the school since this would be the easiest to verify. Primary schools vary from well designed and constructed and well maintained, to poorly designed, constructed and maintained. The frequent scenes on the television news of parents protesting on the poor condition of one school or another can leave no doubt as to the perilous state of many schools. But even where the schools are in relatively good repair the design may be unsuitable for learning.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Many situations are far from ideal but are accepted by many parents who have come to accept them once they can afford the extra lessons and their children can be crammed to get a relatively high mark in the SEA. Whether they are well educated or not becomes a secondary issue.

At the recent symposium held by the EDG (in collaboration with the University of the West Indies and the University of Trinidad and Tobago) David Subran presented a comprehensive paper on "Impact of school facilities on teaching and learning". It is intended that this paper will be posted shortly on the EDG website (educationdiscussiongroup.com). A common feature of primary schools is a large space divided into classrooms by blackboards so that the teaching in one class can be heard in the adjacent class. It would be informative to correlate this feature with performance in the SEA.

There have been two newspaper editorials recently that discuss the problems in the education system: "Drastic overhaul of the education system needed"-Guardian, July 24 and "Our classrooms need to be havens"- Express, July 24. Of particular importance are two articles in the Catholic news by Fr Martin Sirju (August 2 2-"Catholic primary education needs overhaul" and August 9-"Education issues: part two: Lessons and elitist education"). Fr Martin's second article also discusses the ethnic implications of the deficiencies in the system. I shall discuss these four articles in Part II of this series.