<B>By Pauline ETIENNE</B>

We are right in the period when major exam results are coming out. After three months of anxiety and stress, students are getting their marks and can start courses again. After the School Certificate (SC) students last week, it will soon be the turn of the Higher School Certificate (HSC) ones? This is one more opportunity for our school system.

After the Certificate of Primary Education (CPE), it was the turn of the SC to see a slight drop in success rate. Although pedagogues wisely said they would not jump to conclusions, there are reasons for questioning ourselves. With a minister of Education who says he has been striving to achieve world-class education, how come results of the reform take so much time to be seen and felt by the main concerned?

The government must know that its greatest asset is its human resources. Then, why not give a chance to all of them to achieve success? It is obviously not through the elitist CPE system that the government will achieve equal opportunities. Minister Gokhool goes on and on saying that the CPE will be abolished at the end of the day but his failure to state a deadline for its abolition is frightening. Intentions are good but actions would obviously be even better.

The reform has indeed been engaged ? and that can probably be seen in the daily running of classes. I mean, teachers are forced to adapt to the new context in which children are living and are probably (hopefully) going through their own process of reform everyday. However, there needs to be a new structure at national level so that they are no longer bound to complete a strict syllabus to enable children to have the knowledge to sit for an inhumane type of exams at the age of 11 while most have obviously not memorised some of the basic skills. If they have not properly digested the knowledge before leaving the primary, then how can they be successful at secondary level?

Yet, the country really needs skilled and educated manpower to achieve growth. The lecture given by Paul Romer was enlightening because it just pointed at the deep importance of education in the process of achieving growth. As he said, material goods that are the most valuable (like oil for instance) are bound to disappear. Hence, the only way of going ahead is to make sure that people are able to create more ideas and go for more innovations to improve their lives with little raw material. And this is possible only if people are given the right type of education.