Ed Barlett Provides $5 Million in Educational Support for Constituents

Approximately $5 million worth of assistance in the form of scholarships, books, book vouchers and grants, were presented to beneficiaries from East Central St. James, Tuesday (August 24), by the East Central St. James Education Fund.
The assistance programme, which is an ongoing one, will see the provision of all the necessary books for students in grade four in the constituency, the continuation of scholarship funding support for six tertiary level students and the scholarship funding support for ten new students at various stages of their tertiary education.
The East Central St. James Education Fund is financed through private contributions and fundraising efforts staged by the fund, in addition to contributions from the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) of Member of Parliament for the constituency, Tourism Minister, the Hon Edmund Bartlett.
Addressing a presentation ceremony for the handing over of the benefits at the Wexford Hotel in Montego Bay, Tuesday morning, Mr. Bartlett underscored the importance of education to the development of Jamaica, highlighting its necessity to compete in the globalised economy.
“Our hope to be able to compete and survive in globalization is in the transformation of our people from ignorance to education, from inefficiencies to efficiencies, from unskilled to skilled,” he stated.
“It is then that we will be able to produce goods and services more competitively, it is then that we will be able to increase our productivity and reduce our own cost of production and thus be able to do things better, to innovate and to invent,” he added.
He also expressed the opinion that the answer to the crime problems in the city of Montego Bay does not only lie in the provision of more jobs, or in social intervention, but in the removal of the scourge of ignorance from the communities and to replace it with education and knowledge.
“Because what education does is to give you power to reason, power to understand and comprehend, power to build relationships and to sustain relationships and the power, more importantly, to resolve your conflicts through reason and thoughtfulness rather than through cohersion and violence”, he stated.
Mr. Bartlett forwarded the theory that if, within the city of Montego Bay, they are able to build human capital, create knowledge base and expand the horizon of understanding, they will be well on their way to building a better community and solving the wider problem of crime and violence plaguing the city.