"WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE!"

That was the warning to the Ministry of Education from Dr Leonard Shorey who, on Monday night, issued a blistering indictment on this country's declining education and moral standards.

In a one-hour address that brought a standing ovation, he chastised Government for failing to take the necessary measures that would provide a better environment and curriculum to help students maximise their learning skills.

"I'm scared to death about what is happening to the people of my country," he said in a brief interview with the MIDWEEK NATION a day prior to delivering the 14th Annual Louis A. Lynch Memorial Lecture at the Grande Salle, Tom Adams Financial Centre in Bridgetown.

His fears, he said, stemmed not only from education curriculum changes that had resulted in a serious decline in the use of proper English and basic mathematic abilities, but from an unharnessed decline in moral standards.

"We must return to the teaching of grammar," he stressed, adding that many young Barbadians "have (also) suffered at the hands of misguided teachers who were themselves misled into believing that children not be required to learn Tables by heart because rote learning was undesirable."

He lamented the escalating inability to learn by students frequently exposed "to the pernicious impact of the vulgar and society-undermining lyrics" played in some public service vehicles and which left them "mindless" by the time they reached the classroom.

Failure

"One of our great weaknesses in Barbados is repeated and reprehensible failure to enforce the laws that exist on our statute books."

In his address entitled: Quality Education: Challenges And Opportunities In Today's World, Shorey also pointed to evidence culled from research conducted in both Australia and England that confirmed the need to separate boys from girls in the classroom.

He noted that the Australian Council for Education Research had compared the performance of students at single-sex and co-educational schools.

"Their analysis, based on six years of study of over 270 000 students, in 53 academic subjects, demonstrated that both boys and girls who were educated in single-sex classrooms scored on average 15 to 22 percentile ranks higher than did boys and girls in co-educational settings."

Findings from a study in Manchester, England, revealed that 68 per cent of boys assigned to single-sex classrooms passed a standardised test of language skills, versus 33 per cent assigned to co-ed classes.

Researchers had assigned the students at five public schools to either single-sex or co-ed classrooms. Among the girls, 89 per cent assigned to single-sex classrooms passed the test compared to 48 per cent of those who participated in coed classes.

The high rate of teacher "absenteeism from the classroom" was a further concern for Shorey who told his audience that at times pupils were left unsupervised almost all day.

"Moreover, unsupervised classes constitute a wonderfully open and easily accessible environment for undesirable activities, including dissemination of drugs among students, a highly undesirable occurrence."