Our View: Public education stakeholders need to rein it in

If anyone wanted to see how stakeholders’ participation could turn into a joke, they would need look no further than our public education system in which this concept had been taken to an absurd extreme. Stakeholders of public education are not content to engage in the decision-making process with ideas and proposals, but they want to make the decisions and dictate how it should be run.

In a way this is not new, considering public education, for decades and before stakeholders’ participation came into vogue, was run almost exclusively by the teaching unions with the primary objective of it serving the best interests of their members. Now, we have the other so-called stakeholders of public education – students and parents – wanting to dictate how it should be run, the content of the curriculum, when exams are held and how they should be marked.

This week we were given a depressing illustration of how stakeholders misunderstand their role by the board of the Pancyprian Confederation of Federations of Parents Associations of Secondary Education, which declared the first semester exams null and void and said it did not recognise the results which “could only be described as tragic, as tragic as their consequences.” The confederation has taken on the role of examining board, in the belief it has the right to invalidate exam results.

It also posed as a body of educational psychologists saying that “the whole duration of the preparation, that is, tests, suffocating deadlines, excessive curriculum in relation to available teaching time, increased the stress, the pressure as well as the psychological/emotional tension of the children.” It is as if the members of the confederation had not been to school themselves and were not aware that exam periods have always been a stressful but essential time for children – an integral part of the educational experience. Children must learn to cope with the pressure of exams.

This is all part of the hysterical campaign by parents and students, encouraged by teaching unions, to have the twice-yearly exams at secondary public schools abolished. Teenage kids and their parents are also educational experts and have decided twice yearly exams are not beneficial. The confederation had used an error in the first exam students sat in January (the education ministry had realised that the essay questions of a Greek exam had been leaked half-way through the exam and gave new questions) as a pretext to claim that everything was wrong with the semester’s exams.

The low marks, it claimed, were the result of “the level of difficulty of the exams was beyond the bounds” and other such nonsense. The marks were low because the exam questions were very difficult, decreed one of the parent experts on a radio show on Wednesday morning.

Worse still, the parents asserted that for this failure the education ministry was exclusively to blame and “on no account our children, who will not be victimised.”. There was no possibility that children failed to prepare properly for the exams – if they did badly it was the examiner’s fault decreed the stakeholders, who are the new education experts.