Caribbean education must break free from its long-standing fixation on academic certificates and marks, instead embracing a culture that nurtures innovation, critical thinking and an authentic confidence rooted in regional identity, Minister of Educational Transformation Chad Blackman declared on Tuesday.
“The Caribbean child of today certainly is entering a world where certification, though still important, will not be the ultimate measure of success,” Blackman told the Second Regional Transforming Education Symposium and Policy Dialogue (TESPD 2025) as it opened at the Wyndham Grand Barbados Sam Lord’s Castle.
For decades, he said, parents, schools and societies across the region have placed “significant premium on the attainment of certification and marks”. With questions such as “Did you get 100 per cent? Did you get 90? Did you get 40? dominating the measure of a child’s success”.
“Whilst that allows you access to a higher level of education or perhaps a perceived better job, it has taken us so far and no further,” he said. “What it has done is prepared our region and its people to be first-class and world-class managers of things. But it has not led us, by and large, to be innovators, critical thinkers anchored in Caribbean confidence and philosophy to reshape the world in the interests of our people.”
The minister also challenged the longstanding culture of school pride and the informal classifications attached to schools in Barbados and other Caribbean territories.
“Equally, school pride was meaningful, and I’m sure every Caribbean territory here has [it] within its system, whatever system that may be. We wore it as a badge of honour — and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I always say to the team in my ministry, I lived abroad in Europe for 14 years. Never once did anyone ask me where I went to school in Barbados.”
Blackman pointed out that in small societies like Barbados, one of the first questions asked upon meeting someone is: “Where did you go to school?”
“According to where you answer, there’s a classification in their mind — from phenomenally brilliant, to bright, to okay, to not okay,” he said.
As part of the “decolonisation” of education, he argued that such attitudes must be dismantled.
“The point I’m making here, as part of that decolonisation of our school system and education system — and particularly parents have a role to play — is that we must now move in the direction where every school, as cliché as it has become, must now be a school of excellence. And the process in which our children get to these schools must not be burdensome, but equally must tap into the realities of the potential that God has given them.”
The minister’s remarks sought to set the tone for the symposium, which brings together regional policymakers, educators and development partners to examine how Caribbean education systems can be reshaped to meet 21st-century challenges.
Blackman stressed that the transformation must go beyond structural reforms, calling for a cultural shift in how societies value learning and success. (SB)
The post Minister: ‘End certification obsession’ in education appeared first on Barbados Today.
