Fair Comment by Best? Pt I
November 23, 2003
by Dr Winford James
Lloyd Best calls TV 6's panel discussion of November 12 a 'fiasco' and an 'outrage', and the reasons he gives (see his column of November 14) are conveyed in the following excerpts:
'[The] panel focused on nothing strategic. It rambled along affably, disturbing no one. Members did not know we were embattled in an institutional crisis that cannot be tinkered with through trite School of Education measures, sensible at their level but negated in advance by much larger forces. They simply did not know what in our history was the cause.'
'[N]o one in the end came close to making, with the rifle precision required, any lucid and pointed conceptualization or formulation. In what could we say…did the essential issue consist? What did it point to as crucial diagnosis? What did that imply even as tentative prescription? Were there any measures we could proceed to even now, by way of absolutely indispensable interventions capable of making the difference through the processes they might trigger or the critical linkages they might set in train.'
'It is [a] complete innocence of what our system of education and schooling breeds that was perhaps the striking feature of Wednesday's unedifying exchange, notwithstanding the rubric of "crisis". The effect served to mostly to confirm the chilling conclusion that the rot lies…at the top, in particular among our most successful and distinguished graduate elites. It is our elites who seem not to know what the issue is.'
Ignorance by all the panelists of the cause of our institutional crisis. No useful conceptualization by any of the essential issue; indeed, complete ignorance of that issue. No sense on the part of any of the indispensable interventions required. Innocence from all about the real effects of our system of education and schooling.
Is Best's critique fair?
The panel consisted of eight persons and initially had only an hour (which was eventually extended by fifteen minutes) in which to discuss 'the crisis in education', and that time was even further reduced by several commercial breaks. The moderator cannot be said to be part of the graduate intelligentsia. How, it seems reasonable to ask, could such an oversized panel be expected to get to the essence of the crisis in the limited time available, especially when they were moderated by someone who did not have a clue as to what the real crisis might be or as to how to pull apparently divergent theses around some unifying theme - even if the latter revealed itself, ironically perhaps, to be ignorance of the crisis?
I was part of the panel and was about the last called upon to give an opening statement. And as I listened to the others before me, I felt a growing impatience with important but non-essential matters that were being presented as the real issue. How could the real issue be runaway indiscipline (in terms of things like incomplete adherence to the dress code), or missing thousands of students at the secondary level, or a non-focus on humaneness in teaching and administrative practices, or impoverishment of family culture? These are undoubtedly important concerns, worthy of the focus of official and community policy and action. But in what sense are they crises? What crucial community and national disadvantages or defects are they causing? How do they relate to our overall quality of life? How are they affecting our potential as community and nation to grow into the best we could be - economically, socially, intellectually, spiritually?
The concerns were just being published with no connection whatsoever being made (or forced by the moderator) to some indispensable, irresistible national goal. So that when my turn came to speak, I focused on the paucity of self-knowledge and innovation in our economy and polity together with the chronic dependence on imported technologies, and pointed to a link between this state of affairs and the system of education, training, and innovation (ETI). I also focused on the need to define the problem or crisis and then, as Best correctly points out in his column, on the need to set about finding suitable, focused solutions. Indeed, I reactively declared that a number of solutions (which could be challenged) were being pursued in relation to problems identified.
Now, with limited time, with views wandering all over the place, and with a moderator not equal to the task, I thought, and still do, that mine was a good intervention, a strategic one even. But Best, if he heard it, didn't think so, thought I merely 'raised hopes'. I say 'if' because in his review he does not treat with my observation on the insufficiency of the ETI system in the face of the need for far more innovation activity. There simply was not sufficient time to deepen or elaborate. If there was time, one of the things I would have done was to more explicitly link the issue to the goal of international economic competitiveness through robust innovation against a background of the nature of our economy from slavery till now.
I agree with Best that the discussion was a fiasco and an outrage, but not entirely for the reasons he gave. The discussion was simply not properly planned or managed. Its structure did not allow the right kinds of focus. Some of the presenters did not have sufficient opportunity to deepen their sense of the issue or the crisis. The moderator, ill-equipped to start with, logged on to any issue he thought was in the public domain or would catch the public imagination.
But in rubbishing the panel, Best might have done better to show, not simply stipulate, how what particular panelists thought were issues missed the mark. Instead, he chose to take his very broad brush to paint all the panelists as ignorant and innocent of the real issue, and to paint again his theoretical frame of a Trinidad and Tobago and a West Indies where the elites were eminent without any real strategic substance, without having undertaken the right diagnoses.
He also chose to merely offer what his sense of the issue is. Yes, 'merely', for there is no demonstration of how or why his is the real issue.
Part I | Part II
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