An Open Letter to Minister Dookun-Luchoomun

Dear Minister,

I read with interest on March 17th that your Ministry had made provisions for schooling for grades 7 to 9 to continue online using 994 videos and 70 questionnaires through the student support programme (SSP) should Covid-19 force us to shutdown schools.

As we already have our first three cases of that virus I am guessing the SSP will be extended to the other grades of the secondary curriculum. Considering that there might not be a lot of good news* coming our way for the next little while and that students could be at home for weeks if not months I would like to make an appeal that you allow all the students who didn’t get 5 credits at the SC level recently to go through into Lower 6 – which for now will be their homes – and have access to the relevant parts of the SSP. This will help soften the blow of the pandemic.

Thank you.
Best,
Sanjay Jagatsingh


*What Covid-19 Will Do to Mauritius, S. Jagatsingh, March 2020. 

Why Are HSC Pass Rates Dipping?

SC Pass Rate Falls to 20-Year Low

As the chart shows it has fallen steadily in Mauritius for the last decade after stagnating for another one. The lack of progress in the latter has enabled a rapidly-improving Rodrigues to catch up with her bigger sister and even overtake her in 2011 – way to go Rodrigues! But things have deteriorated significantly there in the past four years with the pass rate collapsing to levels not seen in fifteen years. 

This is very worrying given that these pass rates don’t measure the entire harm done by our outdated educational system, one which relies too much on rote-learning. They definitely do not because for one Cambridge says 70% of the students have passed but the Ministry decides that 70% can’t progress to Lower 6. Besides the collapse is too significant to brush it aside with the recommendation that students should work harder. A better approach is required so that we fully grasp what’s happening and respond appropriately. This should include asking independent psychometricians to check if exam difficulty explains any of the mess. And listening to Ken Robinson who reminds us that intelligence has three characteristics https://youtu.be/iG9CE55wbtY. But not before the Minister of Education makes an evaluation of the 3-credit policy public. 

Finally a former Education Minister mentioned recently that most of the HSC laureates come from well-to-do families thereby confirming that the underprivileged have the odds stacked against them. These can be improved by allocating these scholarships to poor:average:rich in the ratio 45:35:20 after bonds are reinstated. The current setup might also need to be reviewed.

Why Dookun-Luchoomun Must Allow 3 Credits to Go Through This Time

Because she doesn’t want to make a massive blunder like Nando Bodha did in early 2015 when he scrapped the point system without assessing its effectiveness and replaced it with a more ‘user-friendly’ alternative. As the chart shows road fatalities for the past five years have never been lower than the level they reached in 2014. Unlike in Singapore (in green) where they’ve fallen in every one of those years save 2018 when they increased by two. In fact if we had managed to have their cumulative number of fatalities over that period – which is setting the bar too low given that they have four-and-a-half times more people than us – we would have saved 75 lives between 2015 and 2019. Mr. Bodha has also been working hard to make the traffic Frankenstein meaner and road-users have already noticed that his tram which he calls a metro didn’t solve anything as expected. 

Instead, Ms. Luchoomun should rather want to take 2020 to properly assess the life and academic trajectories of those thousands of citizens that were allowed in Lower Six with three credits for a number of years and to compare them with those of their friends that had a few more credits. This will provide her with the hard facts of the matter, essential ingredients for good decision-making. My hunch is that there will not be a big difference between the two groups. Definitely not large enough to take the kind of risk the Minister is currently assuming. Too much is at stake here. The more so that we may currently have the worst substance abuse problem in our history and our old industrial education system that relies too much on rote-learning is not adequate anymore for a hyper connected world. Besides Cambridge has computed that 70.93% of the most recent SC-takers have passed their exams – these overlapped an election campaign. That’s 13,235, not 5,518, and therefore means that the British examiner has deemed that even 2,129 of the 3,092 who got 1 credit have passed. Government should in fact allow everyone who took these exams to either have a place in Lower Six or in a polytechnic and to move ahead – Jony Ive isn’t going to be there forever.

Ms. Luchoomun will also want to contact the OECD fast so we participate in PISA 2021 and find out if we have improved from the 56th place we clocked in Maths in PISA 2009, the only time we ever participated in this serious survey. As for the 5 credits needed by the PSC they can be kept but arrangements must definitely be made so that SC exams are available every three months or better still online. The blah blah blah about the necessity of shutting out any student without five credits otherwise we’ll end up with a stupid elite will die out rapidly if we consider two facts. The first one is that our savings culture was killed by someone who did very well in his HSC Economics exam and then proceeded to the LSE on a special scholarship when one Kher Jagatsingh was Minister of Education. The other is that a Minister who has a first degree in law wanted to literally sell our clouds because he didn’t like the CWA hotline.

Worried parents should of course get in touch with their MPs and Ms. Luchoomun. Because we don’t have recall elections yet.