School drifters

Many become homeless too, quite likely because they were previously “aimless drifters” in school, or were put into situations that drove them into “rootlessness.” Given our “back to school” mood now, we should note that there are many drifters in our schools, mainly from the lower social class. Not from all parental or school types though. Without academic or career goals, these “aimless, rootless” students would very likely become street criminals, drug addicts or pushers. Even irresponsible spouses.

As we will discuss later, we found the proportion of “drifters” from secondary schools to be quite high for students from the low social class background - neither studying nor working three years after leaving school.

However, as TTUTA president Mr Davanand Sinanan, cautioned me, there are the “educated mercenaries” too, a group neither “aimless nor rootless” but intellectually and financially rooted to commit the kind of white collar crimes we have been hearing so much about.

These are the ones who have drifted from the moral and civic values required for a decent democracy and who, apparently with lost conscience, preach to others about what the society needs, etc, etc. Will this “well-rooted” greedy group also be a subject in the joint Government- Opposition crime talks now underway? However, the drifters I speak about today – as schools reopen - are the students disconnected from mainstream schooling and doomed to “failure” according to mainstream values. There have been big quarrels in social science over this – mainly over the seemingly social class or racial unevenness found within “drifters.” And why the responsible institutions – family and school for example – do not provide the values and habits required to keep different socio-economic groups equitably rooted within the mainstream, assuming mainstream is now a place of untarnished virtue. Like the poor among us, it looks like we will always have drifters in our schools.

And hence, quite likely, a disturbing level of youth violence and crime.

How can this be prevented? Now that children have passed the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) and put into “free education” secondary schools, what are the chances of some becoming drifters? I have long known that to deal with much of the violence and crime around us, it is crucial to inquire into what is happening in the education system – this middle class institution which, by government stated policy, has taken on the responsibility for shaping the character and habits of its student output – apart from what parents do.

We already know that the dropout rate from the government secondary schools is much higher than the rate from the government assisted denominational schools.

In fact, as already indicated in my new book, Inequality, Crime and Education in Trinidad and Tobago, the twisted distribution by ethnicity, social class and even gender starts from primary school into secondary school through the merit-based SEA – the seeds of the country’s social stratification system.

Apart from SEA entry and school drop-outs, another part of the examination is to look at what happens to our secondary school students after they leave school three years after. And this is where the trouble starts. This is where we find many 16 to 18-year-olds as potentially disruptive drifters.

This is where the competitive, limited-opportunity structure of the education system creates the “great divide” with the young black male drifting the most – an institutional crack over which the nation’s conscience, unashamedly, still remains asleep.

How did we define “drifters?” A “drifter” was defined as a young person who, three years after leaving secondary school remained “neither studying nor working.” We found that while 14% of the students from a low social class background remained neither studying nor working, only 5% of the middle and 3% upper class students remained neither studying nor working.

Our results in the book further show that while 61% of the students from the government assisted denominational schools entered The University of the West Indies, only 23% of the students from government s e c o n d a r y schools did so. This is part of the c o u n t r y ’s story as it drifts from its promises 54 years ago.