Empirical education

“Many people would die sooner than think,” wrote the philosopher Bertrand Russell. “In fact, they do.” But thinking — by which I mean the analytical and/or creative process which is necessary for complex ideas — is not for everyone. It requires you to view thought as adventure and to find mental work pleasurable. More than that, being a thinker requires you to hold no belief unwarranted by evidence or strict logic and, where neither evidence nor logic suffices, to remain uncertain. So the average person, quite rightly, puts their energies elsewhere: they have more immediate things to think about, and who wants to live a life without certainties?

But for a society to progress, there must always be a core of people for whom thinking is like breathing and who, just as importantly, can make a living using their brains. In this way, the society supports intellectual life and ideas percolate down to the ordinary citizen. “The average man’s opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself,” Russell asserted. But I suspect the opposite is true in the Caribbean: people’s opinions are more foolish because they do not think for themselves. This is because we have no real intellectual tradition. Ideas and opinions shape a country but, since so many of our supposed thinkers embrace superstitious and outmoded ideas, our culture is correspondingly unformed and, worse, malformed.

Proper education can change this. But such education must be empirical in two senses: one, policies must be informed by good data; and, two, empirical thinking (which includes logic and ethics) must be taught to students. There are only two educational organisations I know of which do both: the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies, which does not target the underprivileged, and Servol, which does. “The fundamental difference between Servol and more traditional organisations is nowhere more clearly seen than in the field of research,” writes Fr Gerry Pantin in his book A Mole Cricket Called Servol. In the first 12 months after the fledgling organisation was set up, says Pantin, its community promoters were so busy walking the streets asking people what they wanted and needed that it never occurred to any of them to set up a research department or documentation centre.

“It would have greatly astonished them had anyone at that time pointed out to them that they were possibly the only organization in history that began with a research programme before the organization was given a structure, officers or even a name,” he notes. “In effect, what other title than a research team can be given to thirteen people who spend months asking innumerable questions of others and who meet regularly to assess and analyse the answers they receive?” I strongly suspect that it is this starting-point which accounts for Servol’s success: success in the sense that its centres impart practical skills to their students and shape their characters. Whatever failures occur afterwards are not Servol’s fault but society’s or, sometimes, the individual’s. Indeed, I am convinced that any local education expert who has not read Fr Pantin’s book or studied Servol is seriously deficient in their pedagogy, because the organisation provides effective measures for solving many of our system’s core problems.

Yet, despite Servol’s success, successive PNM administrations have been loath to implement the organisation’s policies in the State system. This is partly because of the PNM’s historical opposition to the Catholic Church, but it is more because of the PNM’s historical opposition to competence. Lloyd Best has a kinder view than mine. In a paper delivered at the Third Sitting of the Allan Harris Conference, he noted, “The evidence is that public policy does not deliver the anticipated results, despite much vision and even vigour as well as mounting expenditure.” Translated, this means that the ideas of our leaders and technocrats don’t achieve their stated goals, despite all the money spent. Which is hardly surprising: vision and vigour are useless without proper analysis, and money just goes into a black hole unless you do some sort of research beforehand.

But, unlike Best, I don’t think our officials have vision or even that much vigour. Mind you, I have immense respect for our technocrats simply because, when I consider our politicians’ character and intelligence, I figure there must be extremely gifted persons in the public sector staving off national disaster. But, in every sphere, it seems that the people in charge proceed by intuition or by outdated theory not even adapted to our situation, or by short-term political ends. Thirty-plus years ago, the PNM regime set up technical-vocational departments in the midst of mounting evidence from other countries that this form of education did not translate into economic development. The shift system was introduced without pilot projects to gauge the effects on children. Curriculum changes were implemented without socioeconomic tracking. The effects we see now: endemic violence, high failure rates, an economy which does not generate wealth. So how do we bring about fertile change?

Science writer Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, says, “Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.” He adds, “To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counter-intuitive rules.” So a measure you think will be effective may often have contrary effects. Thus, putting police officers in schools was supposed to stem student violence; all it did, however, was bring a couple of teenagers in front the courts on the foolish charge of obscene language.

If the Education Ministry is serious about improving the system, it must fund research projects into successful schools such as Bishop Anstey’s (successful in that it produces an unusual number of our public women) and SEPOS Secondary (successful in that there are few violent incidents despite the catchment area its students come from), as well as Servol. And similar studies must also be done on problem schools, such as Marabella Junior Secondary, Mucurapo Secondary, and Tranquillity Government Secondary. But, even if such studies are carried out and their findings implemented, all will come to naught unless policy-makers and teachers begin to appreciate the necessity of inculcating empirical attitudes. And the main barrier to such a project is, of course, religion.

E-mail:kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh