Educate our youth differently.
This is the call being made by economist Ryan Straughn.
While delivering the recent Tom Adams Memorial Lecture at Solidarity House, he stated, “Our engagement of the world is to be rooted in preparing our young people to be competitive. Our school system is still modelled after the Victorian system of the late 19th and early 20th century, which was designed to produce public servants. There is nothing inherently wrong in producing public servants, but right now in this 21st century Barbados needs its citizens to be global.
“We must face the word as it is, not as we would like it to be. For this engagement to happen effectively, I believe every primary school child today must first learn how to type. Believe it or not, the ability to type and do so effectively will be one of the primary transformational tools we could offer this economy and society – typing is not the exclusive domain of administrative assistants.
“Every primary school child should be exposed to basic computer programming. There is a subject called Electronic Document Preparation and Management currently offered at CSEC/ CXCs, I would recommend this subject be mandatory for all students in primary school.”
He added, “Our uptake of technology and its applications will be the defining element for transforming the economy in the 21st century. Professor Cardinal Ward is a Barbadian and a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ward holds ten key patents ...he has established the Caribbean Science Foundation in Barbados because he believes and so do I that the next Google, Facebook or large tech company can come from the Caribbean. Let us increase that probability by putting the correct mechanisms to create that reality within the next ten years.
“Also, from a national security and strategic standpoint, the children under 11 today will grow up in a totally digital world. If you listen to the news for the last couple of days you would have heard a new report indicating that the South Korean government was hacked. We in Barbados must develop an army of hackers whose sole purpose would be to protect Barbados’ data and information from foreign and possibly domestic cyber intrusion.”
Straughn also stated, “I would play my part in achieving this objective. In the next election, as the duly elected member of the constituency of Christ Church East Central, I will introduce a number of coding camps for all children between the ages of 7-15 throughout the constituency. This needs to be done today! These are skills that will serve them well in a digital world regardless of the profession they pursue; the goal is to be global but we have to give our young people the tools to operate in that global environment.”
(NB)