general secretary Michael Charles has charged.

Mr. Charles addressed the problem of reading in Bermuda's schools in his keynote speech yesterday at the Hamilton Rotary Club luncheon at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute.

"I think the bottom line is that we have a problem with our young people reading,'' he said.

"What is happening now is that students are coming to school without a language. They are not coming to school ready to learn. And that is where we are having problems having to start from scratch.

"We missed the boat so that what is happening now is that we are having children of children who can't read.

"What you have to do now is to break that cycle, and hopefully, the programmes that we have in place right now will be able to break that cycle.'' Mr. Charles also said: "Education is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expect from them our world and leave them to their own devices..., but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common work.

"Today special poetic vision of the purpose of education is becoming fashionable for reasons that are usually linked to the state of the international economy or the need for international competitiveness. There is ample evidence that arguments related to these matters are driving the restructuring of schools not just in form, but in purpose.

"However, it seems to me that such ideas could not take hold unless we have collectively lost faith in the future.'' Mr. Charles stressed that society must decide whether it wanted children trained or educated.

"When the future is unpredictable and chaotic as it is today, we in society unreasonably expect schools to anticipate the future that cannot be known,'' he said.

"It is convenient to point to schools as the agency that should somehow have anticipated the future and provided for it.

"No one praises the schools when the economy is doing well. Although everyone blames them when it is not.'' But Mr. Charles said the disappearance of jobs owing to technology in the name of productivity had nothing to do with what went on in classrooms.

Michael Charles EDUCATION ED