Turn L’tille around: Go hi-tech

Murder, kidnapping and mayhem have lamentably become almost daily occurrences in the lives of Trinbagonians since 1990.  The commonness of killing produces a numbness that is becoming as acceptable to our collective psyche as the shooting of hapless victims on video games and Gameboys.

How can we arrest this disturbing trend?  How do we sensitise our youth to reject violent lifestyles and gangsta rapping cultural icons whose bodies may be adorned with gold and bank accounts overflowing with “chedda” but whose vocabulary is filled with obscenity and philosophy of life is selfish, misogynistic, and of vulgar materialism? As Trinidad and Tobago braces itself for another wave of energy-propelled investment and income, the state and civil society have to ensure that authentic socio-economic development replaces the recent cycle of “jobless growth.”  The current debate on the approach to the problems besieging our education system has been unfortunately generating more heat than light.

The application of information and communications technologies (ICTs) such as computer-based training or distance learning will have little impact in ensuring that “the end of education is character” — unless positive human values are integrated in both the curriculum and the methodology of education. Such values as truth, non-violence, love, virtue and peace have become all but extinct in most of the teaching approaches which dominate society today.  As Ras Shorty I sang on one of his last recordings, “Yuh throw the Creator out.  Yuh didn’t want He name in yuh mouth.  Yuh take Him out of the school curriculum.  Now yuh paying for yuh action.”

The first steps in rooting out the culture of crime must be taken at home — in the nuclear or extended family.  This step must be followed immediately by the State’s employment of teachers whose primary motivation is not their paycheck (though none of us can live for long without it) but love for the children in their charge and love for the pursuit of truth and knowledge. If public and private schools can be assiduous in pursuing these goals, then information and communications technology can play a vital supporting role to reinforce positive human value-based education. Moreover, the training which can enable comprehension and then command of information technology among our nation’s youth, will serve to empower them to make prudent and morally sound choices about their careers and contribution to society.

Information and communications technology is no panacea; no cure-all for the social ills confronting the national and international community.  It can, however, be applied in a way to foster unity and engender both a higher level of consciousness and as Beryl McBurnie would say, “a higher standard of attitude” amongst our people. If affordable bandwidth or teleaccessibility is for the 21st century what gold was in the 19th and oil was in the 20th centuries, that resource can only be “mined” by a computer literate, educated population.  Fibre optic lines bringing a combination of cable television and high-speed Internet access to the new Beverly Hills housing development in Laventille, can serve as an economic and social opportunity to the people of that community.  For such development to take root however, partnership between the infrastructure providers, UdeCot, National Housing, the Small Business Development Company, NIHERST and the natural elders and youth leaders of the community must be fostered and nurtured.

As Brazilian educator Paolo Freire advocated in his literary works — Education for Critical Consciousness and Pedagogy of the Oppressed, — adult literacy (alpha-numeric and techno-computer) must be motivated by a perceived, urgent need on the part of the recipients.  Similarly, if we are to apply ICTs to the tasks of poverty alleviation, human resource development and socio-economic empowerment, the beneficiaries must be instrumental in the remedial design and implementation. Brazil’s example offers more than a useful approach to education for literacy and development in Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean.  That country’s current leadership has begun to rebuild the coalition of non-aligned developing countries (first formed in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955) to provide an articulate voice in the multilateral struggle over the direction of globalisation.  In the recently failed World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial Trading Round of Negotiations, Brazil emerged as the leader of a group of 21 Developing Nations, including China and India, which refused to accept terms of trade negotiations advocated by the developed OECD nations until contradictions in their own policies, which protect national agricultural subsidies were addressed.

Trinidad and Tobago, which is vying seriously for the headquarters of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) to be located in Port-of-Spain, can ill-afford not to take note of the role that Brazil is playing in both WTO and the FTAA.  Brazilian President, Ignacio ‘Lula’ Da Silva, having toiled for decades as key labour leader in his country, clearly appreciates the domestic implications of his international coalition-building. Better international terms of trade for developing countries will enhance his country’s job creation, export, and foreign exchange earning potential. Similarly, if Trinidad and Tobago is able to catch up to the rest of the Caribbean with a progressive ICT/telecom liberalisation policy, it will then have in place the necessary infrastructure support for the energy windfall on the horizon. This will enable TT not only to strengthen a notable and lingering flaw in our economic development (that is, competitive provision of ICT services to make all national services competitive), it will also release productive forces in the communications sector to train and deploy people who would otherwise be made spectators or “gapers” of “jobless growth.”

The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Guardian Life. You are invited to send your comments to guardianlife@ghl.co.tt