by DONNA SEALY CO-EDUCATION and the Common Entrance Examination are "two monsters" that need to be scrapped. Independent Senator Orlando Marville, speaking in the Upper Chamber yesterday on the final day of the Estimates Debate, said co-education was "a disaster" since the schools had never properly adapted. And the Common Entrance, usually called the 11-Plus, which is used to transfer students from primary to secondary school, should be abandoned. He said Barbados had done itself a disservice by aping the two systems. "I think we all recognise by now that co-education has been a disaster," he told the Upper Chamber. He said there was a thought that if the boys and girls were placed together it would have been "fine". "Instead we have had incredible cases of sexual predation. We have had an obsession with sexual activity which turns some of the pavilions that we held sacred into copulation sites," said Marville. Back in December, while addressing a Democratic Labour Party lunchtime lecture in Belleville, St Michael, he said co-education had failed the children "miserably" and that the 11-Plus was an "abomination" based on "an elitist British tool for differentiating between the haves and the have-nots". He said yesterday: "We are witnessing in this process a moral deterioration which I can only say that the parents and grandparents primarily are responsible for." He added that the "problems" he spoke of did not seem to affect children whose parents went to mosques, or synagogues, or Christian churches. The former ambassador to Brussels contended that boys thought it was "sissy" to learn and not much seemed to have been done to get them to refocus. But this had to be corrected because of long-term implications for the workforce. And if anyone doubted the decline in social behaviour and performance of students, he or she should read the work produced by students at the University of the West Indies, Marville said. About the 11-Plus, he called for proper zoning so as not to "overload the worst students in one school and the best in another". "One of the problems that we have created with our 11-Plus system, the most fundamental one, is when only 30 per cent can go to the good schools, we're telling the 70 per cent remaining 'you're not good enough'. To do this at age 11 is really a little bit sad. "What is worse is that it is based on two academic subjects which do not take into account any of the things like the creativity children have in arts, in language and so on," he said. Marville also knocked the long distances some students travelled to and from school, like from St Lucy to Christ Church and from St James to St John. "I think the best solution of all would be to abandon the 11-Plus and have continuous assessment, have proper zoning and then ensure that the balance between one school or the other is always such that there is no overloading . . .," he said. donnasealy@ nationnews.com
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