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Thursday, May 15, 2025

More than just boots

by

533 days ago
20231129
Wesley Gibbings

Wesley Gibbings

It was around 40 or so years ago the late pub­lic in­tel­lec­tu­al Lloyd Best pro­posed we put our young peo­ple “in boots” as part of a manda­to­ry pro­gramme of na­tion­al ser­vice to in­stil val­ues of ser­vice and dis­ci­pline. I re­mem­ber be­ing un­com­fort­able about it be­cause it car­ried with it a no­tion of co­er­cion as be­ing use­ful in shap­ing del­i­cate minds.

I al­so thought the idea faced the dan­ger of be­ing some­what elit­ist in even­tu­al ap­pli­ca­tion. In coun­tries such as ours, “every­body” is not al­ways … every­body. We wit­nessed this re­cent­ly up­on en­force­ment of pan­dem­ic mea­sures.

Some years fol­low­ing Best’s bold pre­scrip­tion, fel­low Tapia­man Lin­coln My­ers at­tempt­ed to car­ry the idea in­to gov­ern­ment, but it was prompt­ly shot down by (among oth­ers but prin­ci­pal­ly) late Ma­ha Sab­ha SG Sat­narayan Ma­haraj.

Years lat­er, my friend and for­mer PoS may­or, Louis Lee Sing, be­came a lead­ing ad­vo­cate for na­tion­al ser­vice as a way of re­ha­bil­i­tat­ing peo­ple who do not pos­i­tive­ly con­tribute to so­ci­ety. Again, the in­ter­ven­tion of Ma­haraj and oth­ers made sure the idea reached nowhere, through de­ploy­ment of a dev­as­tat­ing mis­sile bear­ing a slo­gan of “forced mis­ce­gena­tion”.

It would thus be in­ter­est­ing to fol­low close­ly what the cur­rent man­i­fes­ta­tion of the idea, as pro­mot­ed by Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly, yields by way of pub­lic com­men­tary and ad­vo­ca­cy.

This time around, what we have is a dras­ti­cal­ly scaled-down ver­sion of the ear­li­er idea of in­cul­cat­ing val­ues sur­round­ing dis­ci­pline and team­work as a way of rec­ti­fy­ing de­viant be­hav­iour. Okay, so that’s an in­ad­e­quate sum­ma­ry of in­tend­ed im­pact, but there is a lot of lit­er­a­ture on this that’s ac­cord­ed much more than news­pa­per col­umn space. The man­date of the Mil­i­tary-Led Aca­d­e­m­ic Train­ing Pro­gramme (Mi­LAT) is to be ex­pand­ed now to in­clude chil­dren who have been ex­pelled from the school sys­tem, af­ter all rea­son­able mea­sures to bring them to a point of com­pli­ance with ba­sic rules have been ex­pend­ed. Mi­LAT was es­tab­lished ex­clu­sive­ly for boys and young men be­tween the ages of 16 and 20. It was set up as a two-year, “full-time res­i­den­tial aca­d­e­m­ic pro­gramme de­signed … to ful­fil the Caribbean Sec­ondary Ed­u­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Cer­tifi­cate of Sec­ondary Lev­el Com­pe­tence (CC­SLC).”

Over a year ago, Min­is­ter of Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice Min­is­ter, Fos­ter Cum­mings, an­nounced he was look­ing at ex­tend­ing the pro­gramme to in­clude girls and young women. I have not heard of any progress on this. So, for the most part, I be­lieve we are look­ing at boys and young men.

The orig­i­nal, key tar­gets are eu­phemisti­cal­ly de­scribed in the Mi­LAT prospec­tus as stu­dents who have been “dis­tract­ed from writ­ing ex­ams”, “no longer see the val­ue in aca­d­e­m­ic pur­suit”, are “dis­tract­ed from aca­d­e­m­ic pur­suit” and, have “be­come dis­tract­ed by life is­sues”.

There are in­fer­ences from such de­scrip­tions that vague­ly sig­nal the sym­bi­ot­ic ac­cep­tance of young peo­ple who now find them­selves out of a place in the pub­lic school sys­tem be­cause of what the min­is­ter de­scribes as “be­hav­iour­al is­sues”.

I must con­fess to have not fol­lowed the progress of Mi­LAT since its in­cep­tion in 2007. What I know is it has spanned sev­er­al po­lit­i­cal ad­min­is­tra­tions and a pe­ri­od dur­ing which there has been a no­table in­crease in con­cern that our young peo­ple are in­creas­ing­ly both the per­pe­tra­tors and dis­pro­por­tion­ate vic­tims of de­viant so­ci­etal be­hav­iour. Such an in­ter­ven­tion, how­ev­er, comes at the end of a process of de­te­ri­o­ra­tion. There are ac­tions that need to come both be­fore and af­ter the cur­rent re­sponse. The cir­cum­stances lead­ing to the be­hav­iours be­ing ad­dressed need to be more com­pre­hen­sive­ly and hon­est­ly ex­am­ined.

There are coun­tries that have tried much hard­er to get to the bot­tom of this through re­search and con­sul­ta­tion and in­formed con­tem­pla­tion. There are nu­mer­ous stud­ies, pro­grammes and ac­tions to be ex­am­ined.

But there are al­so an­tecedents and nu­ances fre­quent­ly missed by those cur­rent­ly pro­nounc­ing bold­ly on the mat­ter here. Some con­nec­tions be­tween ex­po­sures and ac­tions are clear­ly not in­elas­tic or lack­ing in nu­ance. (“They watch too many vi­o­lent movies and lis­ten to aw­ful mu­sic”).

So it is that we need to move be­yond ed­u­cat­ed guess­es and to spend far more time in rig­or­ous re­search and ac­tion when it comes to both caus­es and im­pacts.

There is al­so the ques­tion of what hap­pens af­ter Mi­LAT and oth­er mit­iga­tive mea­sures. In this spe­cif­ic in­stance, for ex­am­ple, there are like­ly to be the chal­lenges of stig­ma­ti­sa­tion and en­su­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion, and oth­er neg­a­tive fall­out from be­ing a part of the pro­gramme.

I would like to hear from the min­is­ter, when there is time and space for fur­ther elab­o­ra­tion, what are the be­for­es, nows, and af­ters that have de­ter­mined that this course of ac­tion is in or­der and ap­pro­pri­ate.

Putting feet in boots doesn’t mean any­thing by it­self.


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