The Democratic Labour Party (DLP) should stay away from discussions about education, says a former Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Education Dr Romel Springer.
He said this was because of the negative impact on many Barbadian students attending the University of the West Indies when the Freundel Stuart Government stopped paying tuition fees in 2015.
Speaking at the Barbados Labour Party’s meeting mounted Thursday night in Husbands Road, The Garden, in support of candidate in the St James North by-election Chad Blackman, the Member of Parliament for St Andrew reported that during his canvass, he reminded a young man “what the other side did as it relates to education . . . when they took away that free tuition for students and parents”.
“I was a young lecturer at [the] university at that time . . . and what people don’t know, what people don’t talk about, is that when all the students went home, a lot of the lecturers went home. So a lot of people became unemployed as well. So even though I enjoyed teaching, I was one of the persons who had to go home . . . . So a lot of people lost their work, a lot of the young lecturers under that particular administration,” he said.
Springer, who is now Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Transport and Works, said when the measure was implemented, his class of about 54 students dwindled to around 13 “when persons had then to look for $30 000 to pay for a course that hitherto was free at the point of delivery”.
“So people who would have had an opportunity to learn and develop themselves here in this country, the only opportunity that they would have had, it was taken away by that Government, by that administration, and now they want to come and talk to you about education. They can’t. How can they?”
He told residents and party supporters “the numbers started to come back to university” when the Mia Mottley administration began paying the tuition fees after winning the 2018 General Election. He added that the administration wanted “to ensure that young people in this country can have an education from nursery all the way up to PhD”.
“They should stay far, far, far, far away from the people children and from people’s schools, because there’s nothing they can tell us about education that we want to hear. Nothing!” Springer said.
He said Blackman already had a vision for a technological hub in the constituency which could be used to improve areas such as farming and educational programmes. (GBM)
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