And as the head hater departs (he is gone, isn't he?), the satrap of savvy arrives. Malcolm Gladwell is in town to address the Lok Jack GSB's tenth Distinguished Leadership and Innovation Conference (DLIC) tomor- row. Its theme is "What makes the great ones great." Mr Gladwell, for the two or three people who don't know, is a writer whose books (The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers) have sold millions of copies.
They bring fascinating (and useful) ideas from the social and physical sciences into the public consciousness. I'm not a fan, but his books are extraordinarily useful in areas as diverse as law, management, adver- tising and communication. This is a man we should listen to.
But here's the irony. The DLIC participants will listen, but it's extremely unlikely Mr Gladwell's message will have any impact on the captains and corporals of industry. I imagine even a few government people will be there, God help them, wasting their time and our money, since any message of innovation, non-linear thinking, and open-mindedness dies horribly as it enters their ears.
This DLIC's tenth installment plays out against a backdrop of the World Economic Forum's most recent competitiveness report, which ranks our "capacity for innovation" in position 120 out of 122 countries surveyed. This means the previous nine conferences have not achieved their desired, or any, effect. And we all know why.
I've spent several columns on the deficiencies of the education system, and the high illiteracy rate, so won't labour those points here. The larger point is that the illiteracy hides and feeds a much more serious deficiency: the capacity, or even the desire, to in-novate, and think outside areas labelled "off limits" by various ethnic and cultural apologists. Wilson Harris called our malaise "an illiteracy of the imagina- tion."
It's a virus produced by (inter alia) the Canboulay and "resistance" crowd, who teach their subscribers that white people have their way, and "we" have "our" way. This usually means that white people think about science, art, and philosophy; "we" think about calypso, moko jumbies, and de tra-dish-uns of win'ing dong low.
The State encourages this: first prize for Dimanche Gras, and a host of other moronic song competitions, is $1 million. First prize for science, literature, art? Zero. No national prize for literature or art. NIHERST has a biennial science competition with a million-dollar prize, which doesn't get a hundredth the publicity and state support Carnival gets.
But this is not the only instance of state/ethnically encouraged deficiency. A general, often and resentfully cited trope in educa- tional statistics is Indo-Trinidadians' dominance (or, as they say on talk radio, "tiefing") of the scholarship lists. But as I listen to some of the children and young adults who win the scholarships and do well in SEA, the impression I get is that what we're producing is a set of talking flash-drives. They store and retrieve information, but have little capacity for independent or creative thought, because they're indoctrinated, not taught to think.
This is cemented in the UWI, which spurns students who try to think past their lecturers. The Baldeosingh, several years ago, was reading for a PhD on a most interesting subject (bio-poetics), and (long story short) was frustrated into abandoning it by people whose articles couldn't get past a peer review, unless their friends were the peers.
And he's not the only one frustrated into leaving because he was probably smarter than his lecturers. Mr Gladwell is of West Indian parentage. Would he have been what he is today had he gone to UWI? Where are UWI's Gladwells?
Lloyd Best (whose blessed name is being dragged into all kinds of convoys of nonsense these days) put it perfectly: "Might it not be significant that the accent is so heavy on rigor and discipline and so light on the romance and enchantment that learning also entails?" Is it any wonder that a majority of emigrants are university graduates who go on to do brilliantly at even mediocre universities abroad? (Google Prachi Mishra's IMF study on the Caribbean brain drain for specifics.)
So. Malcolm. His message will probably have all the effect of common sense on a PNM voter. If the GSB really wishes to do a public service, it would enable Mr Gladwell to speak to A-Level and fifth form students, especially from less privileged areas and schools. Sometimes, a young person needs no more than to be told, by someone he or she considers an authority, that it's ok to be curious and creative, for them to be transformed. Sometimes the message sits there for years, until the student is able to realise it.
Mr Gladwell, and the GSB, would be doing the country a great service if he would simply tell young people (and their teachers): "It's ok to like science, to read literature, to think about things other than Carnival, and it's very possible that you might be smarter than your teachers." And this brings us to another Gladwellian irony. His book, Outliers, investigated exceptional people. Trinidad has, per square inch, produced an astonishing amount of exceptional people-we all know the list: James, Best, Naipaul, Minshall, Lara, Rudra-nath Capildeo, Williams, and so on.
This is one of the things that "we" have always known, but no one has studied what it is about Trinidad that allowed the emergence of so many remarkable people from a single (albeit lengthy) generation. (Note the past tense-whatever it was, it's gone now.)
Perhaps if we focused more on issues like that, rather than re-enacting riots and studying how to "resist" wite people ting (like speaking English), who tief who patrimony, and how bad slavery was, people like Mr Gladwell would come here to learn from us, rather than to teach us.
