As my eldest heads into school today for the first time this academic year, I thought I’d touch on the subject of education. Well, when I say “touch”, I really mean I’m going to ramble, and then I’m going to invite my readers to engage in conversation in the comments below or on social media.

In the last twenty months, the big child has had exactly five days in face to face learning; today will make six days in total. My youngest has been more fortunate, as he went to school for six weeks last academic year and, thus far, has had eight weeks this term. My children are among some of the lucky ones. There are tens of thousands of students who have not seen a physical classroom since March 12, 2020 – the day our Prime Minister announced he was closing schools, effectively immediately. I recall the afternoon vividly: picking up my kids and telling them to ensure that they had packed every last book belonging to them. I knew they would not be going back for a very long time. There are also tens of thousands of students who have never been able to get online for school due to disparity issues preventing them from having internet access, let alone having an electronic device on which to do school work. It is truly a travesty.

Our Prime Minister, the Most Honourable Andrew Holness, and his government seem to have been working tirelessly at rectifying these issues, all while dealing with the dire situation of three devastating Covid-19 infection ‘waves’, the rising crime, and the pre-existing problems within the education system. However, according to the Ministry of Education, more than 120,000 school children were unaccounted for last academic year. To say this is worrying would be an understatement.

Growing up, there was never a question of whether my siblings and I would complete sixth form or not. We didn’t have a choice. In fact, I assumed it was mandatory for all. Call this naive or ‘living in a bubble’, it was what it was. Education was the main priority in our home. So, when it was announced a few weeks ago that the Ministry of Education would be implementing a mandatory seven year programme within high school, I didn’t raise my eyebrows in dismay. That said, I have subsequently listened to people who are not in favour of this development.

In a recent interview with the Leader of the Opposition, the interviewer (a 2nd Form Campion College student) posed a question to Mark Golding regarding the new seven year programme for high school: “What would you say to not only the young children, but to the families, that are worried about this programme?”

Mr. Golding replied, “I don’t think that it has been well thought through, so to have everybody going into sixth form now is going to require significant resources to make that work. The classrooms, the teachers to support it and all the infrastructure around sixth form and the different pathways that have been identified – none of that is in place.” He mentioned that the majority of Jamaican children do not do sixth form – the expense alone makes it prohibitive to many. He thinks that the government has rushed their decision, without having sufficient consultations with teachers, principals and parents across the island. Golding believes that the priority and focus right now should be on helping the children, who have been left behind in the last twenty months, to get back to a positive position within their learning.

I do not disagree, but at some point in the future, I do believe all children should be in high school for the full seven years. The same interviewer, as mentioned above, brought up a pertinent problem in Jamaica: crime. He suggested that keeping the kids in school could help to prevent them from “getting involved with the wrong company, eventually leading to crime.” Once again, I do not disagree. I also believe that some sort of tertiary education, whether academic based, vocational or a technical skill, is beneficial to everyone. Asides from being good for the person doing it, it would be good for the overall productivity and success of our country.

Please leave your comments on these issues either here or on social media: Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Let’s get a conversation going! Thanks, Emma.

I am going to tell a personal story today. It’s about opportunity.

When I was a very little girl, I wanted to be an air hostess. I simply loved the restaurant lounge that looked over the runway at Norman Manley International Airport. Within a couple years, I had changed my mind. I wanted to be an actress. However, my Dad asked me how I expected to look after myself in that line of work. At which point, the youngest of my brothers piped up, “I’ll look after you.” Sweet, eh! In many ways, he actually has always looked after me and looked out for me, like all my siblings. Sometime before I turned ten, I decided on another career and this one stuck for the rest of my childhood and teen years. I was going to be a criminal lawyer.

Growing up, great importance was given to the value of education. I was treated no differently to my brothers when it came to academics. We had to do well. I don’t recall conversations pertaining to this exactly, but it was something we just knew we had to do. This came easily to us all, as did the various sports we chose, but it was not easy being away from home. We each had to find a coping mechanism that suited our individual personalities, and we had to build a resilience to loneliness. Don’t get me wrong, strong friendships with our school peers were formed by each of us, but there are times, like bedtime, when you are laying there wishing you could have that last conversation with your family, not a bunch of strange children lying on the other beds in a dormitory. I am fairly certain most of the other kids felt the same. Alas, exhaustion from our busy day would take over and the next thing to worry about would be:”How on earth do I get out from under my warm duvet on this freezing morning?!” Mandatory-timed breakfast, that’s how! Another busy day started and the goal remained the same: excel at what you do.

So, what happened with my plan to be a lawyer? Well, I did my A Levels (again, academic-focused) in sixth form, then took a year off to work and backpack around Australia, New Zealand and Fiji with one of my closest friends from school. Following this, I got my Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy at the LSE, then went straight to the Leith’s School of Food & Wine. I had had enough of academia. I don’t know if this was spurred on by the arrogance of my peers, who studied the same discipline, or if there had always been a creative side of me waiting to burst out. In school, I had hated arts & craft and home economics, and all of my 10 GCSEs had been academic subjects. One did not do the “arts” in our family!!

With my degree in philosophy and my diploma in food and wine, I began working in all kinds of kitchens at all kinds of places. I loved it. London was on fire with brilliant restaurants. The English were finally making great waves when it came to getting rid of their long-time reputation of having crap food. The private chef business was also booming and I soon found that I fitted really well into this niche. If you were a chef, people were impressed. It was right around the time when chefs like Jamie Oliver were being discovered. Cooking shows were all over the television, and cable TV was a new thing.

One day, I got a call from my agent at the chef agency I worked through. She wanted me to apply for this great gig at the BBC Good Food show. She said I’d be perfect for it. So, I went to the interview, knowing very little about the job, by the way. I sat across from this television producer, who wanted to figure out a way to promote BBC’s brand new cable food channel. All he told me was that they had a food truck to utilise and he had a vague vision of an American diner. Off the cuff, I came up with the idea of cooking mini portions of diner-style food, with a twist, and serving these to customers as they sat in the ‘diner’ to watch video clips from their new channel. At the show, patrons were not only watching the video clips, they were also watching me cook. I am pretty sure my mini burgers in mini coco breads did the trick! Before I knew it, along with my other freelance chef work, I spent the next couple years being a guest chef on their live TV show, Good Food Live. In fact, they even brought me back home to Jamaica to film a series of short inserts, of me cooking across the island, for the live show. It was incredible.

As time went on, I found myself writing for various magazines, like BBC Good Food, and developing recipes. I was good at it, so went to New York to take a diploma in Journalism. Here began my long transition into becoming a full-time freelance writer. You see, I moved back to Jamaica and got roped into teaching cooking. Two years later, I took the plunge and sent an idea for a ‘Single in the City’ column to the Gleaner. They hired me to be a freelance writer and, over the next five years, I took on several columns and a couple different aliases. I had found another career about which I was passionate. During this time, the Observer’s Lifestyle section was really taking off. I wanted to be a part of the action, so I wrote and asked them to hire me. I spent almost three years writing for them. I had a phenomenal editor, who pushed me to write about things I would never have thought of before. She made me a better writer and did not accept anything less than her required standards, which were high! This, in turn, gave me a very valuable skill: the skill of editing. If you wanted your work published in full, you had better learn how to edit your own work with excellence! I wrote for a few magazines while doing all of this, but, of course, the print world began losing out to online media. Times were changing, so jobs were changing. It was time to write a novel.

I self-published my first novel on Amazon three years ago and I am currently sitting on my second, which is, essentially, finished. But, the pandemic happened and happenstance, along with my niece, threw me in the direction of a nonprofit organisation, Cornerstone Jamaica, for which I have been volunteering as a CyberSafety Specialist for over a year. Throughout my life, I have met all kinds of people and one of them has been the founder of a successful nonprofit organisation called CyberSafe Kids, in Ireland. They have educated more than 25,000 children on CyberSafety in the last six years. This organisation trained me in CyberSafety, so that I could start doing the same for Jamaican children. I spearheaded, designed and wrote a CyberSafety programme for Cornerstone Jamaica, called CyberSafe Yuhself. Between the last school term, and the current one, I have given live and interactive online CyberSafety workshops to almost 1800 children and 150 of their teachers, in Westmoreland, Hanover, Clarendon and St. Mary. I truly believe that every human being, who goes online, should be versed in CyberSafety.

In the midst of my volunteer work, something extraordinary has occurred. Many of you must know LinkedIn, right? Well, I’ve been a member for a good while now, but I have not been so active on it. In the last few months, however, I noticed that there has been more activity on my page, so I updated my profile in mid-October. No sooner had I done that, when someone reached out to me and, figuratively, showed me the stairway to a career I would never have chosen for myself. You see, I have always trained for particular niches – cooking, writing, CyberSafety. Don’t ask me about the Philosophy part when it comes to careers, but I have actually used it in much of my writing. Anyway, I have never been formally trained for the work offered before me. That said, what if all my experiences and skills, acquired along the way, were indeed leading me right into this job? What if I am supposed to do this? Well, yesterday I started to officially climb those stairs!

What does it take to be a giving person? Quite simply, kindness.

My mum has always told me to “kill them with kindness”, and goodness knows, it is deeply gratifying to rise above the bullshit and keep being kind. However, life tests us all, pushing us to different and particular breaking points. We each draw the line somewhere and this line is determined by so many moving variables that it would be virtually impossible to figure out where, when, how and why one individual’s limit is at ‘x’ point today and at ‘y’ point next week, let alone the limits of every single person. Perhaps some people do not even have limits when it comes to their kindness.

Auguste Comte, the French philosopher who founded Positivism, coined the term ‘altruism’, whereby one must “live for others”. Comte believed that we each have a moral obligation to serve, help or benefit other people, even if it means sacrificing our own needs and interests. Indeed, there are some truly altruistic people in the world, but what’s in it for them? That’s the point – there isn’t supposed to be anything “in it” for them. There are many times when I have acted with altruism, but the truth is, it is not continuously sustainable.

I have been fortunate throughout my life when it comes to making friends. I do so easily. Some have come and gone, others have remained steadfast in their love, loyalty, empathy and selflessness. I am mostly drawn to people who have altruistic tendencies, and this has become more apparent in latter years. I have witnessed some of my friends giving and giving to people whom they know, and to those whom they have never met. However, while there is immense virtue in altruism, is it virtuous to give so much of yourself, that you end up in physical and psychological burnout? I don’t think Friedrich Nietzsche believed it was so virtuous. This German philosopher claimed that treating everyone else as if they were more important than yourself is, in fact, demeaning and an act of self-degradation, leaving you unable to pursue your own skills and creativity. If an altruistic person is left in this state, can she or he continue to “live for others”and “give to others”? Surely the burnout will prevent this?

Let’s back up a bit and assume an altruist can keep giving completely without burning out. After all, one can surely keep giving kindness without it causing self-degradation, right? Well, in essence, yes. However, there is something that can hinder this: another person; more specifically, another person whose moral philosophy is based on egoism – the pursuit of one’s own self-interest. I must point out that egoism does not require one to ignore or go against another person’s well-being. It simply holds that the self-interest of the egoist be put first. The act of said egoist can be neutral, detrimental or even beneficial to others, and it can even be at his or her own short-term sacrifice, provided his or her long-term interest is facilitated. Ergo, when a person pursues life with egoism and works alongside a person who pursues a life of altruism, the latter either burns out or bows out. Even if the egoist and altruist have a similar goal of, let’s say, giving charitably to children, the egoist’s motivations are so vastly different from those of the altruist that the egoist will eventually get in the way of the altruist’s mission. Indeed, one might then question the egoist’s original and apparent intentions.

We could philosophise all day and find justifications for every action within Philosophy, but life’s second by second decisions do not allow for this in practicality. Sometimes we have ample time to make choices, other times we have to make them off the cuff. We just do not have the privilege to philosophise on every action we take. Simplistically, however, I do believe that we should and are able to figure out which sits better within ourselves: altruism or egoism?