Education ends

Education has only two purposes. One is to teach the individual a marketable skill. The other is to make him a fit citizen. Everything else is just elaboration or, when Education Minister Hazel Manning is speaking, froth. In primitive societies, children are taught practical skills by the grown-ups. But they are socialised by other children. The saying that “It takes a village to raise a child” is true, but not in the way most people think. Judith Rich Harris, author of The Nurture Assumption, explains, “But the reason it takes a village is not because it requires a quorum of adults to nudge erring youngsters back onto the paths of righteousness. It takes a village because in a village there are always enough kids to form a play group.” Contrary to popular and professional belief, it is in the play group, not in the home, that children learn their values and behaviour; and this is true for both traditional and modern societies.

But a modern society requires formal instruction in subjects that hunter-gatherers never had to learn. Take language. All normal human beings effortlessly learn to speak in grammatical sentences with the right words, but it requires hard work to learn to spell the words right and to punctuate them in a sentence. Similarly, all humans can instinctively estimate amounts, but arithmetical calculation is a purely abstract skill. However, human beings don’t learn anything unless they are highly motivated to do so: hence, the second purpose of education (citizenship) can never be separated from the first (training). Put another way, unless children believe that there is some benefit to the hard work of learning, they will never learn properly. And “benefit” always boils down to evolutionary conditioning: skills and attributes that further our survival and reproductive advantages.

In the prehistoric world, such skills and attributes were clear-cut: the good hunters and shapely females had fit genes, the good talkers and personable individuals had smart genes. So it was worth developing such qualities so you could get mates. The point is, an education system can be effective only if the children believe, albeit unconsciously, that studying hard brings specific benefits, not just in employability, but in power, status and attractiveness. The problem is, the Caribbean’s social system was distorted from the very start of our history. Unlike other societies, education here did not develop out of adaptation to Trinidadians’ needs. Historian Carl Campbell, in his book Endless Education, writes, “As in England, the Christian churches took the lead in pioneering inexpensive elementary schools (also known as primary schools) meant to effect conversion to Christianity, to improve Christian moral standards, and to cement denominational loyalties as well as to provide literacy.

The intention was not to promote upward social mobility, since the colony needed a plantation labour force.” Dr Eric Williams wished to correct this fundamental distortion even before the PNM came into power. In 1955 in the Trinidad Guardian, he said, “I see in the denominational school the breeding ground for disunity. I see in the state school the opportunity for cultivating a spirit of nationalism among West Indian people and eradicating the racial suspicions and antagonisms growing in our midst. I place the community above the sect or the race.” Another important skewing was the indifference of the country’s elites to education. VS Naipaul in The Middle Passage remarks, “In Trinidad education was not one of the things money could buy; it was something money freed you from. Education was strictly for the poor.”

Although that attitude is now topsy-turvy, its legacy was that the wealthy never invested in the education system, by grants to schools or even through a system of formal apprenticeship, as happened in other nations. And to this day the curriculum of the Education Ministry is not informed in any systematic way by the needs of the economy. “Everybody was willing to subscribe to the great importance of on-the-job training; but few would have gone as far as to see firms and industries as the leading sectors in the twin sector (firms/schools) training system,” Campbell writes. “The argument that industry has a financial responsibility of the highest order to pay for technical/vocational education generally gained no acceptance anywhere.” Dr Williams saw technical/vocational education as the second string on his fiddle through which historical distortions would be corrected. The tech/voc departments in the government secondary schools were supposed to create employable skills for the working-class in the high-paying energy industries.

But, Campbell argues, this strategy failed for the following reasons: “For technical/vocational education to create jobs it needs to be supplemented meaningfully by structural changes in the political economy of a country; for example, minimum structural changes should include income redistribution to attract graduates into agricultural or craft employment; changes in methods of hiring to ensure that graduates of technical/vocational schools are employed in preference to other persons; changes in attitudes to work in order to banish the stigma attached to some forms of manual labour, as well as improvement of working conditions in industries.”

Mind you, Campbell himself fails to understand that sociopolitical strategies must be adapted to cultural traits. He appears to favour socialist, revolutionary, even totalitarian methods, for achieving desired goals: an astonishing attitude for an historian and a Trinidadian, but one, unfortunately, all too common among UWI academics. Nowadays, thanks in good part to Lloyd Best’s tireless work over the past 40 years, we have begun to appreciate the importance of looking within. The British philosopher and columnist AC Grayling, in his book The Mystery of Things, puts it nicely: “Knowledge is a great treasure, but there is one thing higher than knowledge, and that is understanding. Mere information by itself is worth little, unless it is arranged in ways that make sense to its possessors, and enables them to act effectively and to live well.” This is the core challenge we face in revamping education.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
Website (now updated): www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh