Dixon

Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA) president Doran Dixon is against any cut in spending on education, calling instead for increased funding for the sector.

Addressing the JTA special conference on tertiary-level education under way at Sunset Jamaica Grande in Ocho Rios, Dixon said shifting funding from tertiary to early childhood was not the answer.

"There seems to be the thinking that the thing to do is to shift the resources, money, from tertiary to early childhood notwithstanding the fact that it is accepted that access to tertiary-level education is critical to sustainable national development," said Dixon. "I do not think, therefore, that the answer to the problem is to savage one sector of the system in order to help the other."

Homogenous whole

"The fact is that we should not see the education system as a series of disconnected subsectors but rather as a homogenous whole with different, very intimately connected areas," he argued.

Dixon suggested that rather than trying to redistribute the slices of the small cake, creative and unorthodox ways must be found to increase the size of the cake so that additional slices could be given to the different levels of the system.

It is Dixon's belief that no level of the education sector is oversupplied with money, so to take money from any sector would mean redistributing funding which should not have been redistributed.

According to Dixon, new money is what is needed in the system.

"We need to increase the offerings at the early childhood level, we agree, but also, we need to provide additional opportunities for access to tertiary education. We have to do both things simultaneously or else you're going to have a skewed development because you can't develop a society with only one area of your education system being paid attention," said the JTA president.