Above: Education Minister Ronald Thwaites at the Marcus Garvey Technical School in St Ann’s Bay (JIS Photo)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

A new civics education in Jamaican schools will include the teaching of Garveyism, Education Minister Ronald Thwaites announced.

Thwaites said the teaching of Garveyism is about “building value systems in the schools.”

“Today, resolutely and over all the grades of schools from pre-primary up to grades 11, we say as a people, that we honour our own and that we will uplift the values and attitudes of our people,” he said. “We will remember one amongst us who struggled so that we could have that second emancipation which is our right and our heritage.”

The Minister, who was speaking at the Marcus Garvey Technical School in St Ann’s Bay, said the government’s education objectives transcended test results.

“We want students who are conscious of themselves, who know their place of dignity, of worth, who understand their rights and their responsibilities as citizens of Jamaica,” he said.

The new curriculum, which launches Sep. 3, will include Garveyism as a mandatory part of the curriculum of every grade in schools in Jamaica.

The aim is “to understand the pride and the dignity and the seriousness and the responsibility of being Jamaican, and following in the footsteps of one from this parish and after whom this noble school has been named,” he said.

This week marked the 125th anniversary of Garvey’s birth.