Ribbon Cutting at the Opening of Technology Room And Read Across Jamaica Day
Remarks
By
Dr the Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP
Prime Minister of Jamaica
At the
Ribbon Cutting at the Opening of Technology Room
And
Read Across Jamaica Day
On
May 6, 2025
______________________________________________________________
It is indeed my great pleasure to be with you this morning on Read Across Jamaica Day. In another incarnation, I was the Minister of Education, and I spent quite a bit of my time promoting literacy.
Literacy is important for the development of any society. Literacy is the process by which our young ones develop the skills to access knowledge. We tend to take it for granted, and there are parents who are of the assumption that once their children are speaking, then they believe it is almost automatic that their children will be able to read. And it is something that we see very prevalent in our society.
And in another way, there are parents who are of the view that once they send the children to school, and they are in a classroom, and they buy the books, that the child can read. And then there is another perspective that once they hear their children counting words or being able to identify words, they are also of the belief that their child can read. And then there are some parents who may interrogate the situation a little bit more, and they may ask their child to put a few words together and the child may be able to call the words but not get meaning from the words that they have put together and so the parent might feel comfortable that yes, my child, 02:32 INAUDIBLE a very important step, which is to get meaning from the words.
So, Read Across Jamaica Day is an important opportunity for advocates for literacy in the society to use the platform to reach out to our parents to increase the level of their vigilance, because the development of literacy skills, it is not only the responsibility of the teacher, which oftentimes is the person on whom the burden is placed. Literacy really begins at home with the parents. It is the parents transmitting the importance of accessing and gaining knowledge, developing this curiosity in their children, and encouraging the curiosity for knowledge, and then putting in place all the mechanisms necessary for the child to develop this important skill of reading.
So, on a day like today, we have captains of industry, leaders of this society, influential persons, all coming out to, as our Master of Ceremony said, to model this very important skill of reading. So right across Jamaica, important people, influential persons, politicians and lawyers and doctors and entertainers and of course the teachers will be out modeling reading to children in schools right across Jamaica.
I wish to make some further comments. We are in the information age. We are in the most rapid era of advancement in technology ever in known human history. We exist at a time where we can contemplate with certainty that humankind will make it to another planet. Remember now, it was just 60 years or so ago that humankind could contemplate that man could realistically make it to the moon. Now we live in a time where we can realistically contemplate that man could make it to another planet.
There is so much knowledge. There is so much information, but yet there is so much ignorance in the world because the presence of knowledge or rather the presence of information, the presence of data, does not mean that people will have knowledge. The process of accessing knowledge starts with literacy.
Whenever I address this subject, I’m always drawn to Bob Marley’s Song “Rat Race” where there is a line in the song that says, “In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty.” In the abundance of knowledge, there are still persons who can’t access it, who are ignorant of all that is happening around them.
But there is another element of the situation that we must contemplate because in the abundance of knowledge there are persons whose sole task, their mission is to provide what is called misinformation; to mislead. And there are many persons in our society who are literate, they can read, but they’re not media literate. They’re not going to be able to pick sense out of nonsense and know what is fake and what is real.
And in our society, as we advance in the information age, schools not only have to teach literacy, the basic functioning skill of reading and writing and making sense out of what is read, getting knowledge, but you have to also teach media literacy; what is valid and verified information, and how do you get valid and verified information, the ability to discern what is real out of the information that is provided.
And so on Read Across Jamaica Day I want to emphasize that point to our teachers and our parents that we have to reinforce this higher-order skill in our population. Otherwise, with the explosion in information, there are persons who will get knowledge from the information, but they will not have context within which to use that knowledge and they can easily be misled. So in the information age, we have a higher duty, and that is to ensure that our students are media literate, that they not can only make sense of it, but they can get a higher order of intelligence from what they’re consuming as information.
I thought I would share this with the country today and encourage all parents to play an active role in their child developing literacy skills and I encourage our education system to work as hard as we can to ensure that our Jamaicans are media literate and are able to manage and manoeuvre this very complex world of information that is being thrown at us at our screens, our television, on radio so that we can make sense of the information that is there. This is not a time for us to shut out or withdraw from this ever-changing world. This is now the time when we must develop the skills so that we can embrace technology.
And as I close, artificial intelligence is something that Jamaica must embrace. I am certain that in our schools, already, there are students who are without any structured way, are already using the various apps that they are for artificial intelligence but that is only the tip of the iceberg and very soon we will have to rapidly incorporate artificial intelligence into our teaching and learning methodology if our population is to keep apace with the developing world of work and have persons ready for the new jobs that will emerge out of this new era of technology.
I want to put the nation on alert because we have, as a government, put in place an AI Task Force to advise us, and we intend to move very rapidly to be on the cutting edge of the integration of artificial intelligence into not just our education system, but into our public bureaucracy and into our manufacturing and production industry because that is the way forward and Jamaica cannot be left behind in this information age.
look forward to doing my part in modelling literacy today, and I will be reading from a book. I believe it is a book penned by Shelly-Ann Fraser Price and so I look forward to reading to my students and picking sense out of the knowledge that is in that book.
God bless you and thank you.