Impoverishing a people

September 22, 2004

Numerous reasons have been advanced to explain why some people are not doing as well as others in the formal education system.

What is never said is that education today, unlike yesterday, is a highly expensive proposition and that by and large those who have not been doing well are from amongst the most impoverished of the urban poor.

The rural poor are also hard-pressed but there are always mechanisms, various forms of attachments to land and other income-generating social networks more readily available to them.

Yes, there is also a percentage of people who, particularly since the 1970s, have consciously rejected the formal grammar school education as obsolete and irrelevant to their needs and aspirations.

However, by far the greatest percentage of dropouts today found themselves at certain crucial points unable to afford the process, for example the everyday transportation cost, upkeep in terms of lunch money, uniforms, books, lessons, etc.

Free education has always been and remains a myth.

Any serious professional middle-class parent sitting down today with the aid of a computer to plan the future of a 12-year-old offspring through secondary and tertiary educational levels and unto professional life, and wanting to ascertain the total amount of funding that will be required to accomplish this process, over, say, a period of ten years, will certainly realise that the computing will indicate anything like $1.5 to $2 million. That is a reality.

So the middle-class professional parent will invest in an insurance policy or some sort of investment portfolio for the child's future education.

The point is that some form of wealth generation and accumulation is today standard requirement to guarantee the education of one's children and moreover the preparation and actualisation of an environment at home conducive to study and the challenging and engagement of young minds.

Wealth, in the sense of a social surplus above what the family consumes daily, is important to the education process and to the family's general well-being

Way back in January, 1999, long before all this brouhaha about who is performing and who is not, and who is superior educationally, I said in this space the following:

"...We did not grow up in a cultural world in which people prayed for money and wealth. In the culture we knew, people prayed for health, strength, knowledge and wisdom.

"In our cultural world, it was indeed believed that it was easier for a 'camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.'

"Riches and righteousness were made to seem by nature contradictory. Profits, by extension of the same logic, seemed vulgar, negative and probably even unworthy of our best endeavours and creative energies.

"In terms of careers for the young, business involvement, the enterprise of buying and selling or manufacturing was relegated to a kind of 'poor brother,' second-class status. (We did not seem to recognise that the 'market place' is just us important an agency of education and nurturing as is the school, the church and the family unit.)

"We opted to be clerks and teachers employed by the Public Service, where we were legally debarred from engaging in business activities. A civil servant even had to get permission from his seniors and permanent secretaries to own land, the very basis of wealth generation and formation.

"We, in this particular cultural world, were destined to have no independent means of existence.

"And though this had been an original colonial imperative, geared to dampen our level of combativity, geared to tie us to 'salary' as a means of discipline and physical trap, and geared to reinforce the ethics of Roman Catholicism and Christianity, ie, poverty as value, no one sought to destroy this mindset philosophically as part of our anti-colonial consciousness and struggle.

"If anything, we did the opposite and enhanced the social conventions that support all the negative imperatives.

"When we left secondary school, we were told by concerned parents that we should apply for a job in the Public Service because such jobs are pensionable.

"It was tantamount to assigning our best minds to a life of penury while others were planting land, driving pirate taxis, selling anything that could fetch a price on the market, generally engaging themselves in the market place, turning a profit and accumulating savings as priority before all else.

"And even when they took Public Service jobs their independent economic activities were never abandoned..."

In economies such as ours the people who hold on only to salaries always find the purchasing power of their salaries lessening relative to other forms of income generation and formation, particularly after each economic boom period.

In this way they find themselves impoverished and unable to even maintain the standard of living that they once enjoyed.

I grew up in Tunapuna. I know individuals today who are at present sleeping under the house their parents once owned.

I know some who even if they still occupy the house their parents owned, they cannot maintain it today. Doors and windows are constantly falling out and the place is falling to ruin before their very eyes. They are virtual vagrants in dilapidated brick houses.

Down in Pasea Village, on the other hand, where I knew in the late '50s, early '60s, only ajoupas with cow-dung walls and thatched roofs, the people tending animals, planting short-terms crops and later owning Zephyr taxis, particularly after the railway was abandoned, there today I see huge, shiny, two-storey buildings each with a different kind of modern business downstairs.

So whose grandchildren do we expect to be excelling now?

Look, there are a whole lot more angles and variables to this issue, most of which I have dealt with before, but, trust me, we will either aspire to be the new entrepreneurs or perish as the mad consumers with rapidly dwindling purchasing power.