Cayman Brac West & Little Cayman candidate Maxine McCoy-Moore said Little Cayman’s educational system should be extended beyond primary school, argued against the practice of ‘social promotion’, and said students should be taught practical life skills so they can succeed after graduation.
McCoy-Moore participated in the 10th candidate forum hosted by the Cayman Islands Chamber of Commerce on Friday night. Incumbent Moses Kirkconnell declined to attend.
Kirkconnell also had declined an earlier invitation to debate his opponent on the Cayman Crosstalk radio show.
“Education is also a keynote for me. It needs to be upgraded,” McCoy-Moore said. “That’s the reason why nobody as a Caymanian really can stay in Little Cayman because after 6 years, we [only] have a primary school; after 6 years we have to move again.”
McCoy-Moore said students shouldn’t be promoted unless they pass their exams.
She said, “I would like to see that educational-wise all of the children are not just upgraded to the next class unless they actually pass certain exams. If they don’t pass them, they have to stay in the same class they were in. When I was going to school, that’s how it was, if you were not smart enough to move one. Because not every child is at the same level, everybody is different.”
She said that practical life skills such as budgeting and how to open a bank account should be incorporated into coursework, in addition to core subjects such as Mathematics and English.
Schools need to teach students “actually how to survive after they graduate from high school because most of them are not shown that, and if they don’t have … good parenting … then they’re stuck,” she said.
McCoy-Moore said education should be tailored to children’s abilities and that students with various special education needs or autism, for example, should be put in separate programmes.
“We should have different schools for all these different kinds of children because not everybody is at the same level, so in order to help them we need to introduce a new system” she said. “And the system would be that not everybody is treated at the same level.”
The 10th candidates forum hosted by the Chamber takes place Monday, 22 March, and features candidates from West Bay Central. The debates are posted on various media, including the Chamber’s YouTube channel and Facebook page.