State in A Hurry To Spoil School Holidays

At least for those kids from Standard IV and V who will take part in the Summer School Programme which begins November 24. This is our Government's response to the high failure rate at the CPE exams. I don't think this will really work because almost everybody knows that the problem is not with our kids but with the curriculum which needs to be redesigned to make learning more playful and relevant. Besides there is a much easier way to dramatically reduce the end of primary education failure rate: bell curve the results to allow a few thousands more children in Form 1 in January 2012.

For sure we can learn from Finland where kids begin school only when they're 7, spend the least amount of time in classrooms and yet are at the top of the PISA rankings. By the way, I am hoping Mauritius will start participating in this serious survey in the next few hundred years. Once we get tired of gazing at our navels that is.

Finally, there is another reason why we don't want to go ahead with the summer school programme. And that's because we know that kids now are not as physically strong as they were before. So the last thing we want is to have them spending still more time behind their desks slowly morphing into obese parrots. Nope. We better have them enrolled in a Summer Football Programme.