Engineering education

Talking about education has always been a popular past-time in Trinidad and Tobago. “Proof of this national predilection is an amazingly long catalogue of reports of working parties, groups, or committees set up by the government to investigate different aspects of education policy,” writes historian Carl Campbell in his book Endless Education, which covers the period 1939 to 1986. This interest in education has always been both personal and political: personal in that individuals saw schooling as a means for social mobility, political in that the government saw it as a device for social engineering. Nowadays, though, only middle-class Trinindians seem to have retained this personal concept of education.

The goal of using education to change the society remains, but it has been corrupted by the PNM policy, instituted mainly during the oil boom years of 1974 to 1981, of using educational investment to win votes. But this is not the only, or even the main, reason why educational policies have failed to place our society in the socio-economic position which, judged by GNP alone, we ought to be. Social engineering, you see, is a tricky beast. The outstanding case of a society using education as a tool of progress is Japan which, in the late 19th century under the Meiji Restoration, introduced universal education. Two particular features are worth noting: corporal punishment was not allowed and girls were also educated. For a martial, patriarchal culture, this was revolutionary. Interestingly, such innovative measures were only possible because of the authoritarian nature of the society. But Japan’s authoritarianism was not a dictatorship in the Western sense, but an authoritarianism based on strict adherence to social rules.

We in Trinidad and Tobago also live in an essentially authoritarian culture and political system, but it is not one where leaders or masses adhere to overt norms. Nor have our leaders used their overweening power to make enlightened reforms, such as abolishing the death penalty or legalising abortion or raising the marriage age to 16. And yet, because we follow the Maximum Leader and because our politics is shaped by race, such measures would have only trivial electoral consequences. But Dr Eric Williams didn’t take advantage of that nor, fourteen years after Williams’s death, did Basdeo Panday.

The core lesson from Japan’s success is this: If we want to use the education system as a tool of social progress, then we have to ensure that the norms within the schools are not the norms of the wider society. That has to be the starting-point or else we would simply be perpetuating our society’s shortcomings  — violence, hypocrisy, bigotry, unethicality, authoritarianism and irrationality. Ergo, the norms we want to inculcate among students are tolerance and curiosity. It’s that simple, since from those two qualities flow ethics, rationalism, democracy, conflict resolution and so on.

This shows the barriers to making real reforms within the education system. It sounds all well and good to inculcate curiosity and tolerance in schoolchildren. But that is only because we like to keep things abstract. In practical terms, encouraging curiosity would mean teaching children to question their parents, their teachers, and their pastors. Tolerance would mean, among other things, teaching tolerance for homosexuals. So you see the problem.

And yet, even if policy-makers and teachers could be persuaded to change their approach, I have seen no signs that anyone in authority has studied the methodology of changing attitudes and behaviour. Everybody thinks it obvious that this measure would have that effect, but social psychology shows that what we intuitively believe is often not the case. A pertinent example is juvenile delinquency. Already there is talk about parenting courses and, from sociologist Dr Ramesh Deosaran, a proposal to punish parents for their children’s wayward behaviour. Why? Because, obviously, bad parents produce bad children.

But, notes science journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point, “Studies of juvenile delinquency and high school drop-out rates demonstrate that a child is better off in a good neighbourhood and a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled neighbourhood and a good family.” Obviously, you can’t hold parents responsible for their neighbourhoods. And I’ve never heard any pedagogical expert give the core explanation for juvenile delinquency in the government schools. Campbell notes, “Juvenile delinquency on a large scale in secondary schools, particularly government secondary schools, was something which came into being in the 1960s and escalated in the 1970s.” Campbell goes on to list the shortcomings of the junior secondary schools: badly staffed, lacking graduate teachers, traditions, and external exams.

All this surely contributed to problems, but more pertinent was the growing number of junior sec students. In 1972, they totaled 6,962; by 1979, that figure had swelled to 35,676 with several hundreds of students per school on a shift system. “The junior secondary school was good politics,” writes Campbell. “It took some time before the terminal nature of junior secondary education for most students was unmasked as a national problem.” Why did it become a national problem? At the most fundamental level, it was because the human neocortex, the part of the brain that deals with complex thought and reasoning, can only keep track of 150 persons. “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us,” writes anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who has found that this number occurs repeatedly in human groups, from African villages to American army units.

Gladwell thus argues, “If we want to develop schools in disadvantaged communities that can successfully counteract the poisonous atmosphere of their surrounding neighbourhoods, this tells us we’re probably better off building lots of little schools rather than one or two big ones.” The junior secondary schools, then, are a prime example of negative social engineering. Who would have thought that expanding secondary education in this manner would have such pernicious consequences? But it did, and that tells us why, when it comes to education reform, it is absolutely necessary to be au courant with the newest research in social psychology and pedagogy. And, although I dislike writing column series (mostly because most commentators who do so have an exaggerated belief in their own importance) I want to spend the next few weeks examining the various issues, from learning to violence to teaching to economics to race to religion to politics to sex, that impact on education.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
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