Prime Minister Freundel Stuart says he is concerned that taxpayers’ dollars are being spent on Barbadian students, some at university level, who are obsessed with certification and titles at the expense of a totally rounded education.
Stuart made this observation while delivering the feature address at the local launch of The Human Development Report 2013 – The Rise of the South, at United Nations House in Hastings, Christ Church, yesterday.
The Prime Minister also noted that for the first time in 150 years, the combined output of the developing world’s three leading economies – Brazil, China and India – was equal to the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the industrial powers of the north – the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, France and Italy.
Stuart noted that for some the distinction between schooling and education had become blurred.
“People go to school whether it be at secondary level and nowadays more ominously at university level, but leave uneducated because of the obsessive preoccupation with getting a designation or certificates and not seeing the absorption of knowledge and the internalisation of information as a way to equip them to better understand their environment and to establish meaningful relationships not with the environment but with their fellow human beings,” he said.
