President Richards: Education an asset not an indulgence

STRESSING that “education is a national asset and not a private indulgence” for which the cost  must be borne by all, President George Maxwell Richards yesterday advised graduating students of the Caribbean Union College (CUC) that their paper qualification was just one step in a process which requires constant review and update. President Richards said “each one of us has a major role to play” in providing tertiary education  for youths of our nation. He also called on society to become more knowledge-based, noting that “we are moving faster and faster from an age of things to an age of thoughts, an age of mind over matter.”

He also said the mind of man was “free to invent, free to experiment and free to dream — that is our most precious resource.” Stressing that “today’s world and that of tomorrow” would usher in an information rich and technology intensive society, President Richards told the 200 graduates at the Maracas/St Joseph College auditorium that new approaches to learning were required. “Developing the capacity to learn would be more important than what is learnt. Lifelong and recurrent education will have to be the order of the day. And as we in TT confront a world economy that is rapidly changing, we must increasingly look for our future economic and social well-being to products of the human intellectual, rather than solely to products which our soil and seas can be made to nourish or produce, or our petroleum and gas reservoirs to yield, important though they are, both in the short and medium term.”

President Richards said it was imperative that society become more knowledge based than one which is predominantly dependent on materials. In that regard, the said tertiary level institutions and their products, the graduates, “must have a vital and unsurplantable role, in the continued development of society and especially in the development of its knowledge, technology and skills bases.” He underscored the fact that the information technology revolution was well underway and “likely to strike at many of the foundations of our present society, whether we like it or not.” He said already nationhood was being challenged or ignored by multi-national companies and from the viewpoint of industry and commerce, national boundaries were already of small significance.

President Richards also said those best able to cope with the changes will be those already at the leading edge, while “those left behind by change, risk becoming even more obsolescent,” which will be the “way of the poor becoming poorer and the road to high structural unemployment.” As a result, “our educational system therefore has in this situation, a grave responsibility to educate and train our people to seize opportunities thrown up by rapid changes in industry.” However, President Richards said it was up to us to “decide whether we will take up a place among those countries that lead the way in this revolution that has already begun, or whether we will merely be reactors to the dictates of those countries.” He said “if we do not go forward, we retrogress.” The President stressed that while tertiary level institutions had its role to play, other elements must be put in place to optimise their effort.

He said there “must be public education on an organised scale to propel the masses of our citizenry into a clear understanding of the realities, some of them harsh, of what it means to be without education in a knowledge-based world.” In the same breath, the President said participants in tertiary level education, student or teacher, must be aware that “paper qualification in itself is one step in the process, but the process itself is subject to constant review and update.” He concluded by reminding them that they “must not see themselves as recipients of degrees, but as people who have been equipped to think, to be innovative, and to be a part of the complete transformation of our society from one that must wait to hear what is the new thing on the market, to one that offers the new thing.” The graduates obtained first degrees and associate degrees in a number of disciplines. CUC offers degrees in partnership with Andrews University of Michigan, USA.