No revolution in Education

25 Sept, 2000
THE whole purpose of last week's column was to indicate that the education process is a scientific process that has to be relative to time, place and people. I was tempted to say "persons" instead of "people" just for further emphasis.

The actual words used was that education "is more about extracting from within each individual, a deep desire and will to perform, to manifest that creative spirit which lies within each of us, to release that imagination and mental power to interpret our own experiences within our own environment and design and conceptualise and formulate our own answers to suit our own lives..." It is therefore very much a process that is highly personalised in the sense that so much of it has to be relative to the existing circumstances of each individual. And logically, so much of it involves self-esteem.

We hear talk all the time about the amount of youngsters who "fall through the cracks" and end up lost to the world of purpose and meaning. And all the educationists will tell you that in every single such case, the situation arose as a result of a breakdown in family life, the non-existence of an environment conducive to learning and so on, that when all put together, led to low self-esteem and an embracing culture of degradation that seem to be reinforced by its own internal dynamics and system of social relationships.

Our fear is that the creative and spiritual poverty that we see in such situations tends to become almost largesse. It is important, then, that the cycle of reinforcement is broken quickly and that those who find themselves therein and still possess that spark, that desire for personal development, are provided with the necessary infrastructure and "bag of tools" to work themselves out of the quagmire. At the same time the entire education system must be reconfigured and redesigned continuously to fill up those "cracks", to make it relevant to the new times and to people's actual lives.

The point is that if we claim to know all this, how come "standardisation" of books came to mean "one-book", and how come "universal secondary education" came to mean moving all children at 11, forward to "college", as we say here, without proper measurement and assessment so as to be capable of prescribing what is required in each situation and implementing it? And wasn't all this supposed to be the task of decolonisation? Wasn't all this supposed to be the spinal pivot upon which all social transformation towards true Nationhood had to turn?

We will never forget that fateful night in 1962 when the Mighty Sparrow sang in the Savannah. He had lost some nights before to Brynner in the Independence Calypso competition - (another one of these infernal cultural competitions about which we never, ever seem to have our fill, which in itself tells a lot about us and our sense of development and process which is education) - singing a song "A Model Nation" about the necessity to follow our leaders in certain ways if we were to be successful in our quest to build a nation. Brynner sang in a different vein, with a different purpose, geared to have us jump in jubilation because "this is now our place and our land".

And that night in question Sparrow began to sing his "Model Nation" but stopped after one verse. He turned to the massive crowd and said: "What allyuh say? I singing nonsense, well gimme ah minute!" And he walked back to the leader of the band, Bertram Inniss, now deceased, and whispered something to him. The band immediately changed the music and Sparrow, for the first time, dropped his bombshell, "Dan Is The Man In the Van!"

As the saying goes, "one could have heard a pin drop" as he waylaid into Cutteridge and his Royal Readers, the very basic tools of our early childhood development and our seminal preparation for secondary education. The thunderous applause that erupted after he was done signalled that the Sparrow had touched the raw, sensitive nerves of nationalist pride and may have triggered, by his song, a revolution of the education system. But if that revolution came, it came in outward form never in inner content. We virtually threw out the baby with the bath water.

Many locals began to produce new Readers to replace Cutteridge. They did not comprehend Cutteridge's mastery of the phonetics or "phonics", as the Americans say, each of his efforts was a reader and workbook in one, nor did they ever match his creative imagination in the task of opening young minds to the expansive natural world and to the world of human affairs.

Cutteridge was a master technician with a purpose, the purpose of educating for sustenance of Empire. The locals who did readers were mainly ex-officers of the curriculum department of the Ministry of Education who felt they were on to a good "hustle" and particularly so since one of them had a direct link with publishing facilities. They made a mint but achieved little in terms of the education process. Suddenly more and more children were turning up with "reading problems", unable to process language and master the phonetics.

Can anyone compare "Twisty and Twirly were two Screws" and "Can a Pig dance a Jig for a Fig" with "Boyo lying on a bed with a leaf in his hand" and "Mohan winning the 100 metres race" from the point of view of imparting command of English language skills to children?

The fundamentals of education lies with the ability to command language as a means of communication. It all starts with reading. Once that basic is appropriately and adequately covered, then we can move on to deal with the issue of relevancy as indicated above.

Our revolution in Education was stymied by commercialisation, greed and the lack of purpose and vision. We have gone nowhere. And worse, we are quite likely to go nowhere in the near future. Not that we would not build beautiful buildings and equip them and cram children into them but after that, say what?! The basic demand is for adequate and relevant reading tools for our children as a start to a genuine revolution in education and after that even the sky is no limit.