You won't solve a problem unless you first admit you have one. That is the first thing that an alcoholic or a drug addict has to admit before they are able to benefit from Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. You have to admit that you are in crisis before you will ever resolve it.

Over the last 17 years in this column, I have been pointing out the deep education crisis in our nation which is at the root of our crime problem, our broken families and our persistent underdevelopment and poverty. In last week's piece titled 'Education in deep trouble', I used my own track through Jamaica's elitist education system to show how "Jamaica's education system works well for the elites, but works against the poor, and no government since Independence has had the political will to change the system".

I appreciate the thoughtful response of R. Howard Thompson of Munro College who wrote last Tuesday in this newspaper: "Rich people everywhere will get their children educated as long as they want to do so. The problem is not that the high-school system in Jamaica works only for the rich, but rather that it only works for the better students, like Espeut, who are well-prepared to receive the education offered. There is no reason to believe that he would not have been as successful at any other school in the country that offered the same course of study."

What Brother Thompson is saying is that brilliant students can make mediocre teachers look good, and there is no cause for backslapping and self-congratulation in that. A really good education system is one which takes mediocre students and makes them do well, and takes poor students and brings them to fair or average performance.

'Brand-name' schools

But our education system is not geared for that. Our education system takes the best students and 'ghettoises' them into institutions which Brother Thompson correctly calls 'brand-name' schools; and then - surprise, surprise - students from these schools win the Jamaica Scholarship and the Rhodes Scholarship. The other students are placed in other schools and are made to feel that they are failures even before they begin. There is a lot of academic potential in these slow learners and late bloomers, but I don't believe that our teachers are geared to do the necessary hard work.

Brother Thompson suggests the majority are offered a "trickle down education", a very apt term. In economics the "trickle down" theory of development posits that if the rich get rich enough, something will "trickle down" to those at the bottom, who will thereby cease to be poor. Something is morally wrong with an education system that follows this approach, and we need more people to object to it, and to work hard to change it.

I received five years of high schooling, and I gave back five years as a high school science teacher, three of them in a deep rural area. I had borderline and marginal students before me in my classroom, and I loved them, and taught them, and I have my reward today in their success. As with dominoes, you have to play the hand you draw, and if you look at your hand and decide you can't win, you won't! Good teachers develop the full potential of the students placed in their trust, whether in academics or in sports, and nothing less than that is good enough!

Florida-based Ed McCoy is my biggest critic and a great defender of Jamaica's elitist education system. In a letter published in last Saturday's Gleaner, Brother Ed calls me "something of a literal and verbal 'Robin Hood' of the education system". Is he implying that I seek to rob the rich of their elite education, to give it to the poor? I wish Brother Ed would spend less time attacking me personally and more time addressing the ideas I raise. I wouldn't wish anyone to accuse him of being "small-minded".

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and a Roman Catholic deacon.