The Great Education Scam-Part 4
Education Minister Tim Gopee-singh's "intervention" a few weeks ago to decree that students had to spend more time in class, and less time at sports, clubs, and other things was a little sad because of the grievous misunderstanding of what schools and schooling entail by the man in charge of them.A brief outline of the main issues with the education system are available in Carl Campbell's books Colony & Nation and Endless Education, Ronald Brunton and Nasser Mustapha's collection, Issues in Education in T&T, and Michael Alleyne's Nationhood from the Schoolbag.
Campbell points out that, historically, there's been a strong official sentiment that the lower orders needed just enough education for their stations. Too much education could implant dangerous ideas, like egalitarianism.Independence didn't help. As Alleyne, an architect of PNM education policy, wrote, post-independence education was a politi- cal rather than an educative device. Little has changed: the desire remains to show the quantitative evidence of numbers of schools, and students enrolled, rather than the qualitative evidence of a functional society.
Well, it have plenty school. But what goes on in them, mainly the junior secs, has always been studiously evaded, except when it forces its way into the national consciousness via YouTube videos. From the start, the middle class men and (mainly) women who went to junior secs as teachers were paralysed at the contact with the other Trinidad. It wasn't the Trinidad of MovieTowne, the Rotary, and St Joseph's Convent: it was the one of child abuse, hun-ger, and class and ethnic resentment.
Teachers and system never recovered from the shock. And as Radhica Sookraj's report on education issues in last Friday's Guardian showed-schools as cells of vice and violence-nothing has changed. Primary among the root systemic problems is that the junior secs and many primary schools are built and managed like jails or barracoons: crowded, hot, and brutal. And the schools' physical environments affect their mental atmosphere.
The anthropologist Edward T Hall, in his book The Hidden Dimension, outlines his theory of proxemics-the relation of urban environments to behaviour and culture. Simply put: too many bodies crammed into confined, ugly environments increases social pathologies. In a society whose archetypal social structure is the barracoon, you have to expect those problems.We see the pathologies in maxi-taxis, public spaces, driving. But they're in schools too-I taught at primary schools decades ago, and remember them as crowded and unsanitary. Everybody jammed into a partitioned hall-the case in many country schools, at least back then. Noise. No privacy. Everybody fed-up. But everyone accepting it as normal.
Learning in that environment is hard, but not impossible. But the schools' mental atmosphere is also a consequence of the training of teachers, the administration of education, and the values of the encircling society. In a society where knowledge, progress, and sentience are promoted, the schools would reflect this. One which promotes "jock yuh waist an' wine" as "we culture" and teaches us to "resist" everything "foreign," including Standard English, produces what we see in the schools now: violence and declining literacy.Apropos, it might be a surprise that improvement need not cost millions of dollars and come from foreign consultants. It can come from observing and having the necessary tools to ideate.
An article in the NY Times by Winnie Hu on June 16, "New Recruit in Homework Revolt: The Principal", reported an educational debate in the US involving teachers, parents and academics about the value of homework. One group feels homework is counterproductive. The opposition thinks it's fine as is. Some tried alternatives with some success, and some remained with the old system.The point is, an important issue was identified, thought out, and alternatives were proposed and tested by those involved. (A documentary film, Race to Nowhere, was made on this issue of pushing children too hard. (Details at www.racetonowhere.com.)) Things like this can't happen if you have to write the minister, then the NPTA, then the pastor, then 100 petty officials for "permission" to think.
Otherwise, "pushing" the students, a practice whose destructiveness is known elsewhere, is seen as a "success strategy" here. In "successful" schools, children are ritually abused preparing for an overly difficult competitive exam (SEA). They are conditioned to think that 20 per cent "win" ("pass" for prestige schools), and 80 per cent "lose" (in the junior secs), and this shapes the rest of their lives. If 80 per cent of your children believe they have lost a crucial social competition they didn't know they were in, and never had a chance of winning, and then punished in a prison-like environment from age 11, how do you expect your society to turn out?
This social dynamic is a materialisation of the surviving historical bias: a barracoon pathology festering in our culture: it dictates that the poor must be more miserable than the fortunate, and they must never forget it. It is made real in the school system, in Cepep and URP, in public transport, in hospitals, where just enough is given to survive, at the cost of dignity. Naipaul recognised this 40 years ago-but apparently all education and social policy people here in the last generation missed it.Schools are part of a network of social institutions. They cannot be functional in a willfully dysfunctional society. As for educational models, a viable alternative is no further away than The International School(s) of Port-of- Spain. It would be interesting to know how many of those responsible for local education policy send their children there.
