“For all the advances we have made, and are making in education, we still every year allow thousands more children to join an educational underclass – they are the lost souls our school system has failed. It is from that underclass that gangs draw their recruits, young offenders institutions find their inmates and prisons replenish their jails. These are young people who, whatever the material circumstances which surround them, grow up in the direst poverty – with a poverty of ambition, a poverty of discipline, a poverty of soul.”
These words could have been uttered by someone in T&T about our education system here. In fact, this is the opinion of the Rt Hon Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education in England. His warning was published in the UK’s Daily Mail on Sept 1. He was speaking at Durand Academy in south London.