Let's talk

Classrooms in Jamaica are overwhelmingly authoritarian and undemocratic. They focus on fragmented knowledge that is disconnected from the students’ lives. Proven reforms are resisted at all levels and systematic progressive change is non-existent after many decades. Why is this so? The standard liberal outlook is that schools are ‘neglected’, but they have the potential, with reform, to be a major progressive force in society. This document questions these assumptions through a review of the educational framework on the assumption of the role of education in Jamaica. The major claim to our perspective is that our educational system’s primary role is to mirror, support, stabilize, and reproduce the fundamentally hierarchical structures that existin society. The current state of our educational system is far from ideal. Nearly half a century after the reform of the education system, an overwhelming majority of classrooms are based on the realist model: learning is authority-based and f

The term competition refers to two or more organizations or firms competing in the same marketplace for the same consumer dollar. Competition varies from that of being monopolistic, oligopolistic to that of being perfect or pure. The competitiveness of firms is severely undermined by the high cost of debt service and working capital. These costs affect the total budgetary outlay displacing expenditure in critical areas of infrastructure and human resource development. This has negative consequences for investment and growth in both the short term and long term. Sluggishness in economic activity results in slow revenue growth, further limiting the firm’s ability to provide basic goods and services to effectively compete in the marketplace. The firm’s economic strategies therefore will always be geared toward encouraging investment, increasing output, creating jobs, improving productivity and achieving international competitiveness. Firms compete constantly on the basis of price, qu

As children of a loving, caring, heavenly father, why are we – Christians – still faced with trying to cope with the problems of the world? We all have problems! That’s life; but we also have a Lord who not only helps us grow through our problems, but also gives us the power to triumph over them. God allows us Christians to face difficulties in life not as punishment, but to strengthen our faith and trust in him. God does not only have a redemptive purpose for problems; he also gives us a specific promise in the Bible for every problem. This book, the Bible, is a compilation of these problems that so many people have in common, and of the amazing promise of God to deal with these problems. We are spiritually purified not primarily by the dark night of our soul, but by experiencing how much God loves us when we face failure and limitations. The Bible represents human nature as hostile to God (Ezek. 16:46 – 52 NEB), which is primarily why we fail. It predicts a future fu