Too much, too soon!

18 Sept, 2000
At present I am about completing a piece of work on CLR James which I have titled Remembering and Understanding CLR. It was motivated by the utter nonsense that was reported from the conference held by academics on the campus back in May of this year. The purpose was to seriously explore CLR's political thought and philosophical tenets and show how relevant his work is to the problems of today.

The powers that be today seem to want to make the issue of "universal education" the key issue of the coming elections. But how well do they comprehend the requirements of genuine universal education? To begin the discussion, it is essential that the following paragraphs from Remembering and Understanding CLR be quoted fully:

"...Not surprisingly, we are still not done today with the borrowings and 'fudging' from the 1965 manifesto of the Workers and Farmers Party (WFP). On the question of education, the WFP said: 'The so-called 'free' secondary education must be exposed for the fraud that it is. We shall abolish the Common Entrance Examination. We shall make secondary education free to all children at the age of 11...'

"But while CLR and the WFP were mindful that re-evaluation of all aspects of the education system from curricula to textbooks to the teaching profession itself had to be re-assessed to guarantee infrastructural relevance and quality, and they clearly stated all this in their manifesto, today we seem dumb to such scientific correlation and end up cheapening the ideal of universal secondary education on the altar of political expediency. CLR in all his years of political activity could not ever been accused of such deviation from the natural historic process.

"Walton Look Lai in his study 'CLR James and Trinidadian Nationalism' sums up CLR's approach in this way: '...James... was always more preoccupied with the philosophical and political parameters of change: the issues of power versus powerlessness and the empowerment of the masses through collective social experience and self-discovery, collective trial and error. More important than the specific content of an economic agenda was always the visionary and collective-motivational aspects of the transformation process, the sense of moving collectively from one stage to another...'

"Then Look Lai quotes, of all people, Basdeo Panday, a member of the WFP back in 1965 and today the leader of the UNC and presently Prime Minister of T&T, as having described James as being 'not a politician in the true sense (as) he was always more preoccupied with the macro-historical picture and not with the smaller details of policy...' "It would be laughable if we were not at the very moment experiencing the very horror of social dislocation and dysfunctionality on account of people in governance attempting implementation of 'small detail' completely uninformed by philosophy and therefore without any understanding of the natural laws of social development.

"CLR saw politics as the process of self-discovery; the growth of human beings through their self-organisations and self-activity, and the representative political party, he saw as key strategy to bring forth such self-activity and self-discovery for the masses of people in their communities. Once the people are not directly involved through their self-activity and self-organisations, the political process is dead.

"When Lloyd Best says today that there is 'no politics' since 'politics is about people acting in their own interests for the public good' he is quite correct in his paraphrasing of CLR. Panday did not understand then in 1965, nor today, some 35 years later..."

There are some people who feel that scoring political points through the micro-managing of small detail", eg the painting and repair of bridges, the paving of secondary roads, the painting of water tanks on Laventille hill, the providing of new vehicles and new buildings to the police but with no broadening of the concept of "policing", the housing, "not schooling" of children, all vi-ky-vi and slap-dash, and though good in their own right are really quite meaningless without a sense of process, direction and purpose.

We need to ask ourselves, what is development? Is it merely about physical and material infrastructure? Or is it more about the nurturing of social consciousness from self-activity out of which all else would by extension naturally flow?

What is education? Do we see it as a mechanical act of placing students in like benches and opening their heads and pouring in something called knowledge? Or is it 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.

Education is not about putting something in, it is more about bringing something out. It is about challenging individuals to think. It has little to do with learning by rote and regurgitating. That is probably why we have so much doctors and lawyers and so few social engineers, planners and philosophers.

It is probably why we have so many youths, particularly male, and black at that, dropping out of the system, unable to adapt and conform. It is also probably why we are having today university students, mainly female at that, asking UWI professors if they will be giving lessons and at what cost? It is all one problem. Too much, unscientifically, too soon!