Will it be upward mobility?

Trinidad and Tobago’s securing of 44 of the top places in the world in this year’s University of Cambridge Advanced Level examinations, particularly following on last year’s successes, should be viewed in the context of the thrust and strength of our education system.

The achievement is all the more creditable when it is appreciated that the country’s students secured several "first in the world" places. Given the size of the country the successes are all the more remarkable. I have not seen the full breakdown — students, schools and subjects — as well as the breakdown of the students from the different countries, who placed in the first ten in each of the subjects offered, but I would not be surprised if it is shown either that our successful students represent a higher percentage of the total than those of any other country in the world, or if because of population size we rank the highest.

But even as I salute the achievement of the 44, this achievement should be seen and held up not only as a Trinidad and Tobago accomplishment, but as a Caricom feat. In turn, hopefully most of the 44 will seek to enrol as undergraduates, where this is feasible, at the University of the West Indies.

Credit must be given to the Ministry of Education and its educational planners, as well as to the nation’s dedicated teachers; the several persons who contributed through the giving of private tuition, the positive thinking and approach of scores of the country’s parents and guardians and the determination of the many boys and girls to be achievers. But even as I praise the education system it should be emphasised that several of the student success stories were possible not merely because of their schools’ teachers and the other groups singled out, but because of the course charted by the planners responsible for the CXC Ordinary Level examinations.

Those who chart the course of studies and set the examination papers for the Caribbean Examinations Council "O" Level exams are the unsung heroes of the education system of the English speaking Caribbean. I had written earlier of the need for most of the world rankers to seek to attend the University of the West Indies. I should have added to this the majority of those who did well at "A" Levels.

We have to send a signal to the world of our abiding faith in the quality of the education offered at UWI. It would be a message of faith in ourselves and our institutions, including the University of Guyana and the University of Trinidad and Tobago! Returning to the world rankers and others who did well in the "A" Level examinations, what is instructural is that several of them came from low income homes, a throwback to the days when some of those who did well at the then Cambridge Higher Certificate examinations, had studied under street lights and had only been able to attend such schools as The Queen’s Royal College, St Mary’s College, Bishop Anstey High School, Holy Name Convent and St Joseph’s Convent on Government Exhibitions.

Then, to attend secondary schools, particularly to attend the above which were regarded as elitist institutions, had been regarded both as an honour and a privilege. Only a relative few of the families in Trinidad and Tobago could have afforded to pay the then lordly sum of $16 a term for a son or daughter, or for that matter $12 a term for every other child attending the same secondary school. Today, a child born in and resident in Trinidad and Tobago automatically qualifies for entry to a secondary school, and this whether he or she made zero in the SEA examination or 90-odd per cent.

If I have employed the term elitist institution, I wish to point out that it was not used in the purely social or snobbish sense. I do not subscribe, and indeed never have to the "right" of the wealthy to automatic positions of privilege, and that whatever school their children attended was a "prestige" school. Rather, I lean to the defining of elitism as offered by Trinidad and Tobago’s first Prime Minister, the late Dr Eric Williams in his message to QRC 100 a publication brought out on the occasion of the centenary of Queen’s Royal.

"Elitism was not only social: it was also reflected in high intellectual standards and, in the Sixth Form, the development of critical inquiring minds," Dr Williams had stated. And indeed had Dr Williams been alive today he may have seen in the excelling in sports by students of so many of our secondary schools who (the students) come from so many low income families, the emergence of a new elite.

Dr Williams, in his message to the 320-page QRC 100, had recognised and hammered home a redefining of Queen’s Royal, this time as a result of the social changes of the 1960s, which had demanded and sought to have a fresh look, a fresh approach, through free secondary education at and to the question of the right to entry to elitist secondary schools.

What Dr Williams pointed out then has continued, alas in expanded and continuously expanding form to this day. In turn, the restlessness of the 1960s which would witness a literal explosion in the form of the so called Black Power Revolution of 1969 and 1970 had its genesis in the refusal of the dispossessed to accept that the political, social and with it economic change they had seen or rather hoped for in the 1956 movement had failed to materialise. They were impatient with the vocalisers of the 1950s promised change and, in particular, Dr Williams whom they now saw, and wrongly, as the chief architect of the counter revolution.

In the process, although their struggle was well meaning, and perhaps legitimate, they were guilty of the same error of judgment that Ghanaians had made, when they (the Ghanaians) had believed that Independence meant, or should have meant, the immediate upward economic and social movement of all, who had previously been victims of British Imperialism and arrogance. When this was not realised, in Ghana, they overthrew the man who had articulated their dream of a Promised Land of plenty — Prime Minister Dr Kwame Nkrumah.

The purpose behind the restlessness of Trinidad and Tobago’s youth in the 1960s has been betrayed by the gang and drug related battles for turf. The concern is not for a genuine redistribution of wealth which Dr Williams’ theories and the advent of free secondary education and the quest for tertiary education had encouraged, but the outrageous desire by backsliders to have control of the cocaine turfs of the new Massa.

Educational advance for all too many has been short changed by cocaine lords and money launderers.

Meanwhile, the 44 world ranking achievers should and must be held up as the flagships of renewed hope for a better and brighter and far more ennobling day for all of Trinidad and Tobago’s and Caricom youth.