08 March 2001, 814 words
Nobody ever achieved anything worthwhile by doing it for the sake of something else: not for money, nor fame, nor power, not even ideology. In a recent interview, Shadow commented that he didn't write his songs for competition but for the music. The same is obviously true of David Rudder and the late Lord Kitchener. That is why Horn and Stranger will still be played years from now, while Denise Plummer's two songs will be forgotten by next year - hell, next month.
The Mighty Sparrow, on the other hand, is lionised for a different reason: because he was a rebel, flouting the conventions of colonial society and doing it with absolute standards of excellence as a performer. That difference is why Kitch was composing up to his death, while Sparrow, now an icon, has been living on past glory for decades.
But Sparrow, too, did not become a calypsonian because he expected to achieve international fame or respectability. He was singing exclusively for the grassroots people he belonged to. Indeed, that is the second characteristic of persons who achieve at a superior level: a democratic conscience. Both Rudder and Shadow have this; and so did William Shakespeare, who was the most popular playwright of his day.
Interestingly, these principles - that great achievement is possible only through commitment to the thing-in-itself and when the work has democratic appeal - apply even to such a practical activity like technology. In his book Guns, Germs and Steel (available, incredibly, at RIK) anthropologist Jared Diamond notes: "...many or most inventions were developed by people driven by curiosity or by a love for tinkering, in the absence of any initial demand for the product they had in mind...It may come as a surprise that these inventions in search of a use include most of the major technological breakthroughs of modern times, ranging from the airplane to the automobile, through the internal combustion engine and electric light bulb, to the phonograph and transistor."
What this tells us is that, whether we are speaking of the arts or the sciences, mere technical competence is not enough. A pure love of knowledge in which the product is almost accidental, or a passion for creation where accolades are secondary - this is what underlies real achievement.
It is for this reason that our education system is often a trap for the best minds we produce. Ours is a system which is aimed at producing only technical competence. There is little or nothing in it intended to encourage a love for knowledge. That is up to the individual teacher who possesses such passion and passes it on to their students.
Yet the fact is that, if such an approach were part and parcel of the education system, teaching the technical aspects would not only be easier, but the children would learn them more effectively. Japan, which has one of the best formal education systems in the world, is now trying to reform it because they have been unable to produce scientists capable of cutting-edge research.
We, on the other hand, have been trying to emphasize scientific and practical subjects at the expense of the humanities. That is because we think that our future lies in technical expertise, even though we shall produce no top-notch scientists who don't study and work in the metropole, and even though our strengths have always lain in our cultural products.
Mind you, this de-emphasising of the humanities has not made any significant change in our social attitudes. But that is because the humanities have always been badly taught at all levels of the education system. Anybody who is truly educated about cultural issues in this society is so in spite of, not because of, their formal schooling. So teaching the humanities could hardly compensate for the socio-economic, demographic and political factors that have made our young people less cultured and more barbarous.
Even so, subjects like literature and history and social studies may well be more important to our society, in the long run, than the math and physics and chemistry. Writing in 1935, Bertrand Russell said, "The world at present is full of angry self-centred groups, each incapable of viewing human life as a whole, each willing to destroy civilisation rather than yield an inch. To this narrowness no amount of technical instruction will provide an antidote. The antidote, insofar as it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective."
ou can bet your beloved children, though, that when Prime Minister Basdeo Panday talks about an "intelligent nation" he has nothing like this in mind: demagogues can never view education as anything more than a tool for power and for profit.
Copyright © 2001 Kevin Baldeosingh