Rethinking the education process for today’s children

THE EDITOR, Madam:

I read with great interest the absorbing article by Ruthlyn James in The Gleaner of Tuesday, December 16, 2025, in which she defined what student engagement assistants should be doing to benefit students with disabilities in today’s education system. Her analysis was simply brilliant, clearly thought through, and sensitive to all involved, including the Ministry of Education which she was ultimately advising.

Her article triggered for me the wider concern about the nature and modes of instruction in general in today’s and tomorrow’s physical and virtual classrooms. Her article viewed the issue from the perspective of children with disabilities. The arguments apply to classroom support for all students, up to and including the so-called “bright” or gifted students who get bored by traditional instruction.

Let this article challenge our educators to rethink the modes of instruction, the nature of the curriculum, the orientation of the spaces for learning and all aspects of the education processes that are appropriate for today’s children who teachers agree are bored, distracted, and uninterested in the education curriculum. Many students today see no value in education. How do we capture their interest in developing their critical skills, buying into the values of being a responsible and productive citizen, and channelling their energies to confront the many existential challenges facing our national development? This is the age of rapid technological change, accelerating climate change, sudden shifts in global economic relations, persistent threats of pandemics, disruptions in traditional migration patterns, and an endless flood of illusions that are absorbing the senses and thoughts of our young people.

Several countries have evolved working models of reorganized and refocused education processes and the systems that support them, which are appropriate to their reality. We should examine what they did and how, to guide our re-thinking of the whole education process for children who will grow up in a vastly different world than the one for which the current system was designed.

Maybe, the editorial can explore these themes as thoughtfully as it has explored the problems of debt, integrity in government, and approaches to economic development in times of environmental and global crisis in recent issues,

MICHAEL WITTER