A’ Level success puzzles

At the same time, such an outstanding performance raises a puzzle. An outsider, hearing these rankings, would naturally assume that this country has an excellent education system. That assumption, as citizens are all too aware, would be wrong. The results from the last CXC examinations reflect a failure rate of almost 50 percent in the basic subject areas. How, then, can we have a few students doing so well, and a majority either attaining mediocre grades or failing dismally?

The short answer is that our education system, being still fundamentally a colonial inheritance, caters for the elite students and bypasses the academic under performers. In other words, we have a system which pays the most attention to those young people who least need it, and ignores those young people who most require a good education. It appears that we have retained the worst elements of our colonial education and added various non-productive ideological traits to that superstructure. The results — or lack of them — are now plain to see.

Indeed, the continual excellent performance of our country’s students in the A-Level exams raises a second, but related, puzzle. Since this society clearly has a lot of native intellectual talent, how is it that Trinidad and Tobago is not doing a lot better than it is? It is true that, when it comes to creating a stable and prosperous society, intellectual abilities can only go so far. There also needs to be political commitment and social trust and so on. But the distance a country can travel on just bright people is pretty far indeed. Yet this has not happened here, and we must discover why.

There is one obvious answer. Although exact figures are not available, it appears that a significant proportion of academically gifted persons — perhaps even a majority — end up going overseas to study and staying there. It has long been argued that the Caribbean’s main export is its brains. If this is so, it bodes ill for our future. No society can hope to progress if most of its academic stars end up lighting foreign skies. And the problem is not that our young people go overseas to study — this happens in many developing nations. The problem is that they do not come back.

This is the issue that we have to tackle. Other societies, when striving for modernisation, have always sent their most able citizens to more advanced countries to learn and to return with that learning. Japan is the most notable example of this strategy, and most of her citizens did return to help their country develop. Why does this apparently not happen for Trinidad and Tobago, especially given that so many Trinbagonians living overseas seem even more patriotic than those who have remained?

It would be easy to say it’s just money, but this answer is inadequate. Many of our talented sons and daughters living in the cold countries could come back here and make a comfortable living. If they choose not to do so, and if others choose to leave and not return, it is often because they are convinced that the very talents and skills our society needs would not be appreciated here. It may well be that, if we could solve that problem, we would find that our native talent stays native.