23 April - 05 June 2004, 10,239 words
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 socioeconomic 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 &endash; i.e. violence, hypocrisy, bigotry, unethicality, authoritarianism, 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. So in this essay I will examine the various issues, from learning to violence to teaching to economics to race to religion to politics to sex, that impact on education.
Education ends
Education has only two purposes. One is to teach the individual a marketable skill. The other is to make him a fit citizen. Everything else is just elaboration or, when Education Minister Hazel Manning is speaking, froth.
In primitive societies, children are taught practical skills by the grown-ups. But they are socialised by other children. The saying that "It takes a village to raise a child" is true, but not in the way most people think. Judith Rich Harris, author of The Nurture Assumption, explains, "But the reason it takes a village is not because it requires a quorum of adults to nudge erring youngsters back onto the paths of righteousness. It takes a village because in a village there are always enough kids to form a play group." Contrary to popular and professional belief, it is in the play group, not in the home, that children learn their values and behaviour; and this is true for both traditional and modern societies.
But a modern society requires formal instruction in subjects that hunter-gatherers never had to learn. Take language. All normal human beings effortlessly learn to speak in grammatical sentences with the right words, but it requires hard work to learn to spell the words right and to punctuate them in a sentence. Similarly, all humans can instinctively estimate amounts, but arithmetical calculation is a purely abstract skill.
However, human beings don't learn anything unless they are highly motivated to do so: hence, the second purpose of education (citizenship) can never be separated from the first (training). Put another way, unless children believe that there is some benefit to the hard work of learning, they will never learn properly. And "benefit" always boils down to evolutionary conditioning: skills and attributes that further our survival and reproductive advantages. In the prehistoric world, such skills and attributes were clear-cut: the good hunters and shapely females had fit genes, the good talkers and personable individuals had smart genes. So it was worth developing such qualities so you could get mates.
The point is, an education system can be effective only if the children believe, albeit unconsciously, that studying hard brings specific benefits, not just in employability, but in power, status and attractiveness. The problem is, the Caribbean's social system was distorted from the very start of our history. Unlike other societies, education here did not develop out of adaptation to Trinidadians' needs. Campbell writes, "As in England, the Christian churches took the lead in pioneering inexpensive elementary schools (also known as primary schools) meant to effect conversion to Christianity, to improve Christian moral standards, and to cement denominational loyalties as well as to provide literacy. The intention was not to promote upward social mobility, since the colony needed a plantation labour force."
Dr. Williams wished to correct this fundamental distortion even before the PNM came into power. In 1955 in the Trinidad Guardian, he said, "I see in the denominational school the breeding ground for disunity. I see in the state school the opportunity for cultivating a spirit of nationalism among West Indian people and eradicating the racial suspicions and antagonisms growing in our midst. I place the community above the sect or the race."
Another important skewing was the indifference of the country's elites to education. V.S. Naipaul in The Middle Passage remarks, "In Trinidad education was not one of the things money could buy; it was something money freed you from. Education was strictly for the poor." Although that attitude is now topsy-turvy, its legacy was that the wealthy never invested in the education system, by grants to schools or even through a system of formal apprenticeship, as happened in other nations. And to this day the curriculum of the Education Ministry is not informed in any systematic way by the needs of the economy.
"Everybody was willing to subscribe to the great importance of on-the-job training; but few would have gone as far as to see firms and industries as the leading sectors in the twin sector (firms/schools) training system," Campbell writes. "The argument that industry has a financial responsibility of the highest order to pay for technical/vocational education generally gained no acceptance anywhere."
Dr. Williams saw technical/vocational education as the second string on his fiddle through which historical distortions would be corrected. The tech/voc departments in the government secondary schools were supposed to create employable skills for the working-class in the high-paying energy industries. But, Campbell argues, this strategy failed for the following reasons: "For technical/vocational education to create jobs it needs to be supplemented meaningfully by structural changes in the political economy of a country; for example, minimum structural changes should include income redistribution to attract graduates into agricultural or craft employment; changes in methods of hiring to ensure that graduates of technical/vocational schools are employed in preference to other persons; changes in attitudes to work in order to banish the stigma attached to some forms of manual labour, as well as improvement of working conditions in industries."
Mind you, Campbell himself fails to understand that sociopolitical strategies must be adapted to cultural traits. He appears to favour socialist, revolutionary, even totalitarian methods, for achieving desired goals: an astonishing attitude for a historian and a Trinidadian, but one, unfortunately, all too common among UWI academics.
Nowadays, thanks in good part to Lloyd Best's tireless work over the past 40 years, we have begun to appreciate the importance of looking within. The British philosopher and columnist A.C. Grayling, in his book The Mystery of Things, puts it nicely: "Knowledge is a great treasure, but there is one thing higher than knowledge, and that is understanding. Mere information by itself is worth little, unless it is arranged in ways that make sense to its possessors, and enables them to act effectively and to live well."
This is the core challenge we face in revamping education.
Education errors
"The theory determines what we can see," Einstein once remarked. This saw kept running through my mind when, some weeks ago, I attended a lunch-time seminar put on by the Gender Studies Unit of UWI. The presentation by the three women researchers was titled "Children of Migration: A study of the Psycho-Social Status of Children in Trinidad whose Parents have Migrated." The Inappropriate Capitals should have Warned Me what to Expect.
I won't embarrass the researchers by naming them, because I believe they are well-intentioned. But the fact that people with such mistaken ideas can affect policy at the Education Ministry is a worrisome thing. The researchers had interviewed children in a junior secondary school and, while much of the data they had amassed was useful, nearly all their conclusions were completely without foundation. "It was found that children separated from parents because of migration were twice as likely as other children to have emotional problems although their economic status was improved," they asserted. But at no point did they prove that there was causation and not merely correlation (and it was interesting that only the three men in the audience seemed sceptical of the conclusions).
Mind you, causation would have been difficult, even impossible, to prove. Doing so would have required a personality analysis of the parents, not just the child, since it may be that it is a particular kind of parent who leaves their child in the care of others. If that parent passes on their personality traits to the child genetically (traits such as non-conscientiousness or an antagonistic attitude are 50 percent heritable), then that, not parental absence, is the true cause of the child's problems.
The problem was, because they cleaved to wrong theories, the researchers didn't even attempt to explore alternative factors where they could. For example, they did not break down their data to see if the Trinindian kids (who made up eight percent of the group of children with parents living overseas) had a higher rate of depression than the Trinafrican (who made up 37 percent of the sample) or mixed ones (29 percent), even though cursory evidence suggests that IndoTrinis are more prone to depression than AfroTrinis. Indeed, when I raised the point, the psychiatrist denied that genes were a significant factor in clinical depression: yet the link between genes and severe depression is established beyond reasonable doubt.
Similarly, when I suggested that their findings would have little merit unless they tracked the kids into young adulthood to see if the effects persisted, the head researcher said that many studies had proven that separation from parents in childhood had permanent effects. This is untrue on two counts. First, there aren't "many studies": prospective longitudinal surveys, which track people from youth to adulthood, are very expensive and very difficult to do. Secondly, the few such studies have found that childhood experiences do not carry into adulthood. "It has turned out to be difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personalities, and there is no evidence at all of large &endash; to say nothing of determining &endash; effects," writes psychologist Martin Seligman in his book Authentic Happiness.
Lastly, although the researchers found that many of the children were often moved between care-givers, they didn't even attempt to do a correlation between this movement and levels of emotional problems: because their theory didn't tell them that changing peer groups creates emotional instability for a child.
Ironically enough, the researchers did make one correct recommendation despite their wrong ideas: strengthening the school so the child would have a stable environment. But the practical measures that strengthening entails must rest on correct ideas and, even before that, identification of the main problems in the school system. The latter has been well ventilated, most recently in the closing months of 2003 after the outbreaks of school violence then. Because it was mainly professional educators involved, the discussion was of a high standard. Commentators such as School of Education lecturers Raymond Hackett and Winford James, Teachers Training College lecturer Samuel Lochan, retired teacher David Subran, Bishop Anstey principal Valerie Taylor and several others all weighed in with insightful analyses.
In a discussion arranged by the T&T Institute of the West Indies, Taylor focused on an education system designed for only the top 20 percent of students, as well as more immediate shortcomings such as dilapidated buildings, lack of materials and resources, and low teacher salaries. Lochan wrote on the lack of meaningful leadership in the school system, either from principals, teachers or TTUTA. Subran criticised the assumption that some students were competent to learn only technical subjects. But you can never get away from theory. Lloyd Best, this country's most educated man, asserted, "The challenge is to acknowledge that our crisis is institutional, deep-seated and not susceptible to being defused by any trite and pedestrian measures, however seemingly sensible and urgent."
The roots of our main problems in education go back 30 years; and it is not coincidental that this is exactly one generation. "The newer government secondary schools and especially the junior secondary schools of the 1970s had to carry the burden of the academically weak and most indisciplined students from the primary school system," notes Campbell. "No way has yet been found to establish parity of esteem between the older schools and the new secondary schools."
The Education Ministry has a plan to change this. A Student and Staff Support Committee is to be established in all secondary schools. Measures include a student council; continuous professional development for staff; a prefect, house, and mediation system; clubs and interest groups; and a comprehensive guidance and counselling programme. Earlier this year, the Ministry took out an ad calling for about 30 guidance counsellors and two or three psychologists.
But none of these measures will have the intended effects unless they are based on a solid foundation of good theory and rigorous research. Many of the proposed solutions are based to a great extent on folk wisdom, but folk wisdom only works for folk cultures. A modern society needs up-to-date, scientific ideas; and this brings me to one of the core reasons we are an underdeveloped country: the contempt so many laypersons and experts have for empirical thought.
Empirical education
"Many people would die sooner than think," wrote the philosopher Bertrand Russell. "In fact, they do."
But thinking &endash; by which I mean the analytical and/or creative process which is necessary for complex ideas &endash; is not for everyone. It requires you to view thought as adventure and to find mental work pleasurable. More than that, being a thinker requires you to hold no belief unwarranted by evidence or strict logic and, where neither evidence nor logic suffices, to remain uncertain. So the average person, quite rightly, puts their energies elsewhere: they have more immediate things to think about, and who wants to live a life without certainties?
But for a society to progress, there must always be a core of people for whom thinking is like breathing and who, just as importantly, can make a living using their brains. In this way, the society supports intellectual life and ideas percolate down to the ordinary citizen. "The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself," Russell asserted. But I suspect the opposite is true in the Caribbean: people's opinions are more foolish because they do not think for themselves. This is because we have no real intellectual tradition. Ideas and opinions shape a country but, since so many of our supposed thinkers embrace superstitious and outmoded ideas, our culture is correspondingly unformed and, worse, malformed.
Proper education can change this. But such education must be empirical in two senses: one, policies must be informed by good data; and, two, empirical thinking (which includes logic and ethics) must be taught to students. There are only two educational organisations I know of which do both: the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies, which does not target the underprivileged, and Servol, which does.
"The fundamental difference between Servol and more traditional organisations is nowhere more clearly seen than in the field of research," writes Fr. Gerry Pantin in his book A Mole Cricket Called Servol. In the first 12 months after the fledgling organisation was set up, says Pantin, its community promoters were so busy walking the streets asking people what they wanted and needed that it never occurred to any of them to set up a research department or documentation centre.
"It would have greatly astonished them had anyone at that time pointed out to them that they were possibly the only organization in history that began with a research programme before the organization was given a structure, officers or even a name," he notes. "In effect, what other title than a research team can be given to thirteen people who spend months asking innumerable questions of others and who meet regularly to assess and analyse the answers they receive?"
I strongly suspect that it is this starting-point which accounts for Servol's success: success in the sense that its centres impart practical skills to their students and shape their characters. Whatever failures occur afterwards are not Servol's fault but society's or, sometimes, the individual's. Indeed, I am convinced that any local education expert who has not read Fr. Pantin's book or studied Servol is seriously deficient in their pedagogy, because the organisation provides effective measures for solving many of our system's core problems. Yet, despite Servol's success, successive PNM administrations have been loath to implement the organisation's policies in the State system. This is partly because of the PNM's historical opposition to the Catholic Church, but it is more because of the PNM's historical opposition to competence.
Lloyd Best has a kinder view than mine. In a paper delivered at the Third Sitting of the Allan Harris Conference, he noted, "The evidence is that public policy does not deliver the anticipated results, despite much vision and even vigour as well as mounting expenditure." Translated, this means that the ideas of our leaders and technocrats don't achieve their stated goals, despite all the money spent. Which is hardly surprising: vision and vigour are useless without proper analysis, and money just goes into a black hole unless you do some sort of research beforehand.
But, unlike Best, I don't think our officials have vision or even that much vigour. Mind you, I have immense respect for our technocrats simply because, when I consider our politicians' character and intelligence, I figure there must be extremely gifted persons in the public sector staving off national disaster. But, in every sphere, it seems that the people in charge proceed by intuition or by outdated theory not even adapted to our situation, or by short-term political ends.
Thirty-plus years ago, the PNM regime set up technical-vocational departments in the midst of mounting evidence from other countries that this form of education did not translate into economic development. The shift system was introduced without pilot projects to gauge the effects on children. Curriculum changes were implemented without socioeconomic tracking. The effects we see now: endemic violence, high failure rates, an economy which does not generate wealth. So how do we bring about fertile change?
Gladwell says, "Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions." He adds, "To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counter-intuitive rules." So a measure you think will be effective may often have contrary effects. Thus, putting police officers in schools was supposed to stem student violence; all it did, however, was bring a couple of teenagers in front the courts on the foolish charge of obscene language.
If the Education Ministry is serious about improving the system, it must fund research projects into successful schools such as Bishop Anstey's (successful in that it produces an unusual number of our public women) and SEPOS Secondary (successful in that there are few violent incidents despite the catchment area its students come from), as well as Servol. And similar studies must also be done on problem schools, such as Marabella Junior Secondary, Mucurapo Secondary, and Tranquillity Government Secondary.
But, even if such studies are carried out and their findings implemented, all will come to naught unless policy-makers and teachers begin to appreciate the necessity of inculcating empirical attitudes. And the main barrier to such a project is, of course, religion.
Ethical education
Here's a nice question for an ethics exam: " 'Prostitution has been an effective friend to marriage'. Discuss."
If in school you have been taught Morals and Values, then you won't have to devote much thought to this statement (taken from an essay on Love by A.C. Grayling). Your answer, however padded, will boil down to one sentence: "Prostitution is wrong!" Which is the fundamental problem with making Morals and Values part of the education curriculum: such a course does not encourage thinking nor, for that matter, goodness.
A good teacher would modify the course in a rational manner, but most teachers will not and cannot do so. After all, this is a society where the Education Ministry has adopted a failed policy like abstinence-only to fight HIV and is actually planning to introduce superstitious nonsense like Transcendental Meditation to reduce school violence. I expect that teachers would instead teach some version of their religious beliefs, offering the students no rationale for adopting particular morals or values save that it will be good for them: and such circular logic can convince no youth who isn't already so inclined.
This is why it is better to teach ethics than morals. But teaching morals and teaching ethics are two distinct, at times even contradictory, things. Ostensibly, both have the same goal: to teach an individual his rights and obligations vis-à-vis other persons. But moral teaching requires the students to accept whatever the teacher tells them. Ethical teaching requires the students to think for themselves, with the teacher acting as guide. So, in a class on morals, the teacher would most likely invoke the religious strictures against fornication and adultery in order to "prove" that prostitution is wrong. But this does not answer the question, nor does it foster analytical thought.
In a class on ethics, the teacher would raise questions. Since many men are inclined to philander, and since paying a prostitute is cheaper and less time-consuming than seduction, does prostitution help prevent a man leaving his wife? Why is the family unit so stable in a culture like Japan where prostitution is woven into the culture but dysfunctional in America where the official view of prostitution is influenced by Puritan mores? Why is domestic violence highest in countries, such as Islamic theocracies, where prostitution is punishable by death? Is prostitution wrong if a woman makes it her career choice or only if she is forced into it by circumstances?
The advantage of this approach is that it enables young people to decide for themselves what their moral standards should be. But this is exactly what moralists do not want youths to do (or other adults, for that matter). Religious believers almost invariably want to control others and, as history shows, are always willing to use force to do so. Such believer are also purveyors of ignorance and, even if there weren't other factors, this alone should be sufficient reason to keep religious teachings out of schools.
After all, what responsible parent would want Pastor Clive Dottin teaching their child that evolution, the cornerstone of biology, is "a Satanic theory"? Do you think your child can ever be truly educated if they learn at Pastor Cuffie's Miracle Ministries High School that the Earth is only six thousand years old instead of four billion? Is a child's intellect not corrupted when pandit and UWI lecturer Prakash Persad suggests that Indian civilisation is 25,000 years old when historical anthropology says the first civilisations began no more than 10,000 years ago? Aren't children misinformed when imams tell them that the Qu'ran has all the knowledge they need?
Ethical teaching aims to produce citizens who will question those in authority at every turn. Moral teaching, by contrast, wants to produce citizens who will accept the status quo: indeed, Christianity and Hinduism have often been used to get the poor and oppressed to accept their unhappy lot in this world by promising rewards in the next. This raises a central problem of moral teaching: the tendency of persons who believe they are moral to feel themselves absolved from acting morally.
A recent BBC survey of 10 countries found that the country with the highest level of religious belief is Nigeria. It is also, according to Transparency International's 2003 survey, the second most corrupt country in the world. Journalist Robert Wright, in his book The Moral Animal, says, "…the feeling of moral 'rightness' is something natural selection created so that people would employ it selfishly. Morality, you could almost say, was designed to be misused by its own definition…Chronically, subjecting ourselves to a true and bracing moral scrutiny, and adjusting our behaviour accordingly, is not something we are designed for."
This is where morals and ethics part ways: morality depends on heteronomous principles which supposedly have some existence apart from human realities. Ethics, however, are always based on desirable outcomes and what our limited knowledge, based on human nature and history, suggests are the best ways to achieve such outcomes. This is why teaching ethics is educational in a way the teaching of morality is not. Morality says certain principles and actions are good in themselves; ethics says right action must be based on reasons: what makes people better or worse off, and the logic that we should treat others as we would like to be treated. So ethics, properly taught, creates empathy in a way moral teaching does not.
We do not need religion to teach values. A moral principle, if it is solid, does not require the invocation of a Supreme Being to prove its worth. And ethnographic surveys show that all cultures embrace six core virtues: Wisdom and knowledge, courage, love and humanity, justice, temperance, spirituality and transcendence. In practice, the majority of religious believers usually fail to follow the first four. To prove this, let me end by posing another question for an ethics exam: "Should persons be appointed to high office on the basis of qualifications or on the basis of being married to the Prime Minister?"
Ethnic education
A glance at the Advanced Level scholarship results over the past few years would suggest that Indo-Trinidadians are academically superior to Afro-Trinidadians. Of the 200 hundred scholarships offered in 2002, Indo-Trinis took 68 percent of the awards. Of the 16 boys who got National and Additional scholarships, 10 were Indo.
Ethnocentrists like Maha Sabha leader Sat Maharaj have happily used these figures to trumpet the superiority of "Indian" (i.e. Hindu) values, while even ethnocentrists on the other side have accepted the numbers and argued that "their" people are in crisis. But you've got to be cautious with statistics: context is crucial.
So let's look at some other stats. A government-commissioned survey conducted in 2002 by British pollster Robert Worcester found that six percent of Indo-Trinis had a university education as compared to five percent of Afro-Trinis, and five percent of Indos had A-Levels compared to four percent of Afros. But when it came to O-Levels, 43 percent of Indos had Os compared to 45 percent of Afros. Main points: while both groups are on par certificate-wise, Afros outdo Indos slightly at secondary level but there seems to be a trend for a minority of Indos to do better in higher education.
A breakdown of CXC passes in 2002 for English and Math shows the following: the national failure rate for English was 36 percent. In the Caroni educational division (where Indo students presumably form the larger percentage), the failure rate was 49 percent. For Math, the overall failure rate was 47 percent; in Caroni, it was 49 percent. Yet, oddly, in the now defunct CE exam in 1999, Caroni primary schools had 31 percent of the top 100 students, with Hindu and Presbyterian schools accounting for 44 percent overall.
These figures must be taken in a context where, according to a recent poverty survey by Ralph Henry, Caroni is the least poor county in Trinidad and Tobago: it has an indigent population of just 3 percent, as compared to a high of 24 percent in Nariva/Mayaro. More importantly, however, Henry found no significant difference in poverty levels between "Africans" and "Indians" (but I assume he's talking about Trinidadians, since I doubt he got funding to survey two whole continents). The point is, if Indo-Trinis were academically superior to Afros, it should be reflected in disparate poverty figures.
Now let me freely admit that I am a mathematical moron. But, given the stats from Worcester, the Education Ministry and Henry, it seems to me that the scholarship results do not reflect any sort of general Indo superiority. Instead, a more reasonable interpretation is that a very small percentage of Indo/Hindu students are achieving at the higher levels, but the ethnic tiers below that are both equal and dismal: giving the lie to Sat's assertion that "a rising tide lifts all boats". Bear in mind, too, that according to the 1990 census Indos make up 40.3 percent of the populace while Afros make up 39.6 percent, so it may well be that numerical superiority is a key factor in the racial disparity among schol winners. Additionally, this interpretation fits the hierarchical culture of Hinduism.
It would be easy to prove or disprove this by checking the marks for students at various grades and doing an ethnic breakdown. Such an analysis might even be useful in helping determine the pertinent factors that lead to academic success or failure. I strongly suspect, though, that the recent success of Indo students in terms of scholarships reveals the usual suspect in our education system: that it caters only to the talented and ignores the needy. And, in every country with a good education system, there is only one common factor: they all concentrate on helping slow learners.
Allowing ethnicity to invade pedagogy not only corrupts learning, but also the construction of a real society. Campbell asserts, "It was the deliberate social intention of the Hindu and Muslim founders &endash; unlike the Canadian Presbyterian providers &endash; to strengthen Indian religions and cultures and hence the separateness of Indians, if need be, at the expense of national identity and integration…It seems reasonable therefore to believe, in the absence of empirical studies, that the Muslim and Hindu schools of the 1950s had a more disintegrative function than an integrative effect upon the society, however beneficial they were to Indian communities."
There is no reason to believe that this goal has changed substantially, although the Indocentrists may find it more politic to pretend otherwise. And, in my view, ethnic education also stymies the emergence of a class of intellectuals (as distinct from academics). As a writer, I find it significant that, among the younger generation of newspaper commentators, the only three persons with an intellectual bent &endash; i.e. young fogies - are Indo-Trinidadian: Kirk Meighoo, Raymond Ramcharitar, and me. (There's also Newsday's Emily Dickson and the Guardian's Denzil Mohammed, both in their early 20s and not intellectual, but nonetheless well-informed and far better prose stylists than most of the older generation of columnists.)
I used to think that my becoming a writer was a choice. When I got smarter, I assumed that my intellectual predilection was the result of genes and personal experiences which I cannot even identify. But, while both these views still have some merit, I now also think it cannot be coincidental that Kirk, Raymond and me come from Presbyterian and Hindu backgrounds: Indian descent and our forebears' Christian conversion helping to make us Nowhereians. (Dickson and Mohammed also seem free of ethnic loyalities.) Because it is impossible to be both ethnocentric and a real intellectual: this is why Devant Parsuram Maharaj, also a younger-generation commentator, cleaves to crackpot ideas like ancient India having advanced technology, Hinduism being the root of all civilisation, and there being an "Indian race". It is also why, despite our broadly similar tendencies, Kirk, Raymond and me have fundamental disagreements and begin from different philosophical perspectives. (Technically speaking, Kirk is an Empiricist, Raymond an Idealist, while I am a Rationalist.)
This Nowhererian perspective was certainly a trait of the older generation of intellectuals, who are mostly Afro-Trinidadians and certainly didn't consider themselves "Africans". I do not by this mean that students should not be taught about ancient Africa and India. The problem is, if such information is given with the intention of creating ancestral pride, then what will be taught won't be history, but myth and propaganda. And the problem with that is that such teaching, far from creating tolerance and understanding, will merely exacerbate the tendency towards group bigotry that is part and parcel of human nature.
Erotic education
If, in five to ten years' time, the rates of HIV-infection and teenage pregnancies go up in Trinidad and Tobago, Education Minister Hazel Manning will have to shoulder a lot of the blame. Not that she will, though, given that hubby Patrick has never made a wrong decision in his entire political career.
Nonetheless, it is under Hazel's watch that the Education Ministry has introduced an abstinence-only policy in the teaching of sex education: and the fact that Hazel and the Ministry technocrats can play politics with an issue where children's lives are at stake reveals how deficient they are in moral fortitude. Indeed, they may even have a purely mercenary motive for adopting this ineffectual policy: the Bushmen's administration (to borrow columnist Lenny Grant's inventive nomenclature) is reluctant to fund any sex education programmes which promote condom use.
Nonetheless, according to US ambassador Roy Austin, us heah natives should jess bow down to Massa Bush cuz of all the aid he done give us. However, when aid leads to AIDS, I think we should be rather less than grateful. Which is not to exculpate Hazel and her minions, nor Health Minister John Rahael and his travelling wife.
Abstinence-only programmes do not work. One study showed that teenagers who made public pledges of abstinence had the same rates of sexually transmitted diseases as those who didn't. More worryingly, only 40 percent of males who pledged abstinence used a condom during sex, as compared to 59 percent of non-pledgers. And female non-pledgers were twice as likely as female pledgers to go for STD tests.
This study was funded by America's National Institute of Child Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But I will lay my head on a block that neither the Education nor the Health Ministries here are going to do any similar sort of tracking to see what results their abstinence-only policy has. After all, this is a country where politicians are happy to look like they're doing something, rather than actually working.
My prediction is that the abstinence-only policy will either have negative effects or none at all. After all, the policy itself is not based on any genuine criteria or even genuine concern about what is best for young people. As with the arguments against legalising abortion or giving homosexuals equal rights or abolishing capital punishment, abstinence-only is a case of outdated religious principles blocking social progress and, by so doing, adding to the sum of human misery.
There was a time, long ago, when moral strictures against fornication were eminently practical. That time was when human beings still lived in small bands and there was no birth control. A woman who was too promiscuous would have too many children for too many men, and as a result probably not get sufficient protection and resources for her offspring. This is why marriage came about in the first place: a public acknowledgement that two people were in a sexual relationship helped to mitigate, though not eliminate, violent rivalries. And, even so, the biological evidence suggests that infidelity was fairly common and that marriages probably didn't last for more than four years.
Many religious strictures are based on these biological instincts (which is a main reason for the cultural success of religion). But, in the modern world, confusing these ancient instincts with moral rightness often leads to immoral social policies. Sex education is perhaps the main instance of such confusion. The purpose of sex education is, first of all, to teach children biological facts about reproduction. Secondly, sex education tries to instil values that would help youth avoid the consequences of irresponsible sexual behaviour: mainly, pregnancy and disease.
Now, obviously, the most effective way of achieving these ends is by chastity before marriage and fidelity during. But, even more obviously, education policies must take account of people's actual behaviour: and youths are actually having sex at around 17 years of age. The believers' argument that telling youths to abstain and be faithful will lead to behavioural change is entirely without foundation, not least because the loudest trumpeters of such values are often known hypocrites or just rebarbative human beings.
This is why three-pronged sex education programmes &endash; abstinence, fidelity, and condom use &endash; have proven in different countries to be the most effective in lowering teenage pregnancies and STD infections. The religious apologists love to argue that "secular values" are the cause of these ills, but as usual their arguments completely ignore reality: in this case, the reality that the countries with the lowest rates of STDs and teen pregnancies are those with comprehensive sex education programmes which emphasise, in particular, condom use. This is because the policy-makers in those countries aren't trying to change behaviour per se, but only targeting specific actions.
And any conscientious policy-maker would agree that the consequences of irresponsible sex are too devastating not to implement proper sex education policies for youths. But here is where we run into the problem with the religious mindset again: religious beliefs frequently suspend people's conscience. Pedagogy researcher Michael Gurian, in his book Boys and Girls Learn Differently!, writes, "Teenagers must take risks; most will take risks they consider (later in life) slightly or seriously immoral, and certainly quite dangerous. It has always been the job of mentors and educators to help young people through their risk behaviours."
Gurian recommends the following measures for an effective sex education class. The class should be team-taught, by a female teacher and a male (who may be a teacher or a counsellor or a father or other male volunteer). Same-sex and separate groupings should both be used, so sensitive and difficult areas can be covered. Fathers and elder males should be conscripted to talk about their own experiences and a man's responsibilities. Sex education must be taught in all the high school years, not just some.
It is unlikely that the Education Ministry will promote or even approve of such measures. But the true power in education has never been with the Ministry, but with the teachers. Whether teachers use that power for good or ill, however, depends on them not catering to the ignorance of the powers-that-be.
Education exemplars
In Japan, teachers enjoy a status equal to doctors or high government officials. This is almost surely one reason why Japan has such an effective education system. A child will not learn facts or values from someone they don't look up to. Gurian, speaking about kids between 11 and 15 years of age, says, "[T]eachers play a far more crucial role than we have wanted to admit. We play it even more strongly than we did a generation ago, for the extended family, family and other support systems are now generally shattered…For many middle schoolers, the teacher is one of a bare handful of the most stable presences in the child's life…middle schoolers of all kinds want attachment to the teacher. Some show it by anger, others by sadness, or silence, or attention-getting devices. There is no middle-schooler who wants to learn language arts, math, science, or any other subject in the presence of an elder she or he does not trust or like."
So a key goal in improving our country's education system must be to raise the status of teachers. In previous times, teachers enjoyed high status simply by virtue of being educated. Nowadays, though, educational achievement has been devalued by various factors. The oil boom in the 1970s, for instance, allowed persons who had nothing but connections to get rich, thus strengthening the crony culture of our society. But even before that, the promotion of pseudo-intellectualism, mainly by leftist intellectuals in UWI's Social Sciences faculty, undermined real thinkers. Given Dr. Williams's decision to emphasise science and technology, it is interesting that the centre of crankdom appears to have now migrated to the Engineering Faculty, judging by the absurd articles about philosophical and scientific matters which emanate from that quarter.
But teachers are the adults whom teenagers interact with most, so giving status to teachers is crucial if the adult society wants to exercise influence over its youths. But how do we do this in our culture? The first way is to pay teachers more. Unfortunately, we are a very shallow-brained society, as shown by our penchant to name things after beauty queens and sportsmen. Thus, the most effective way to ensure that students respect teachers is to ensure that teachers can drive nice cars. Without going into any detailed calculations about inflation and cost-of-living, it seems to me that, at the present time, primary and secondary school teachers should not be earning less than $108,000 per annum.
Is this within the sphere of practical economics? I don't know, but since Prime Minister Patrick Manning spends hundreds of millions on CEPEP and wants to spend half-billion more on an unnecessary Parliament building, I suspect that this wage bill is quite possible. Moreover, paying teachers will not, strictly speaking, be recurrent expenditure since, properly handled, that outlay will lead to economic expansion. At present, although the Education Ministry has often gotten the highest budgetary allocation, it ranks lowest in expenditure per employee of all government Ministries. Moreover, this country spends only four percent of its GDP on education, down from a high of six percent in the 1980s, when we should really be spending about seven percent.
So we need to spend more, but we also need to spend more wisely. Paying teachers a good salary is not enough: even in our materialistic culture, young people are smart enough to confer respect only if money is backed by skills. So teachers must come to be seen as professionals, like lawyers or doctors. This means, first of all, continual training; and that in turn means that teachers must not get more than four weeks' vacation per year. The present vacation periods should instead be used for training and consultations. In this new system, teachers' salaries will not be standard across the board, as TTUTA would like to be the case. Instead, the salary levels of individual teachers should be contingent on successful completion of training courses, with extra pay for extra duties. A bonus payment for schools which exceed specified goals may also be a feasible idea.
But it is equally important that training must be geared towards producing individuals who do not, in their professional roles, reflect the norms of our society: the physical aggression of MP Eddie Hart, the irrationality of PhD purchaser Pastor Cuffie, the ethnocentric fact-skewing by child educator Anna Maria Mora, the empirical unreliability of psychiatrist Dr. Hari Maharajh, and so on. The training of teachers must be based on liberal and intellectual tenets.
Even more important than all this, however, is getting teachers who actually like young people. "How we learn is not always dependent on how we feel about our teachers, but just as often, it is. Studies show us that memory, for instance, is enhanced is an adolescent learner feels emotionally cared for by the instructor," writes Gurian. It is impossible to get all, or even most, teachers to fall into this category but a good training programme will help ensure that there is a sufficient core of such persons.
And a sufficient core, really, may be all that is needed to revolutionise our education system. Sociologist Jonathan Crane of the University of Illinois has done a survey showing that, once the number of professionals in a given community drops below five percent, the effects on teenagers become catastrophic: drop-out rates double, as do teen pregnancies. Gladwell argues from such findings that "little causes can have big effects", holding that "Social epidemics [are driven] by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people [who are] energetic or knowledgeable or influential among their peers."
But, as the incident last week at San Fernando Secondary Comprehensive showed, the adults in authority, from the Police Service to the Teaching Service Commission to the Parliament, are the worst sort of exemplars for young people. For this reason, it is all the more important to get persons with the qualities listed by Gladwell to become teachers.
Eristic education
"Eristic" is my favourite obscure word: usually applied to debate, it means "aimed at winning rather than at reaching the truth". This kind of attitude was well-displayed by the haste with which armed policemen were dispatched week before last to the San Fernando Secondary Comprehensive School to quell a students' protest. The protest, sparked by the impending transfer of Gene Bacchus, the school's acting principal, revealed nearly everything that is wrong with our education system: and the fault, as the dear brutes in authority proved, lay not with the children but with the adults.
First of all, the fact that someone called the police showed the school administration's incompetence. Second of all, the fact that the police found it necessary to arrive with sub-machine guns showed exactly why police officers should never be used to discipline children. And that was just the start, with the dotishness continuing to be displayed by the higher authorities.
"The Ministry's decision is to counsel the pupils so they will fully appreciate how the system works," said the inappropriately-named PR officer Hilton Braveboy. Yeah, well don't waste time: the students learned exactly how the system works the minute armed policemen arrived. Then there was sociologist Ramesh Deosaran, playing to the cameras at a meeting between education officials and a parliamentary Joint Select Committee which he chairs.
"We can't have children dictating who they want for principal," said Deosaran, in that gentleman-with-diarrhea tone he usually adopts. But three years ago Deosaran had absolutely no problem with dictatorship when he accepted a post as Independent Senator during the 18-18 deadlock. Apparently, even in the absence of consultation, it is wrong for students to protest over a matter that affects them. But it's okay for a non-elected government to spend public funds, including paying the salaries of Independent Senators who have nothing to do.
And then there was the Teaching Service Commission which, in an attempt to deflect criticism for its handling of the transfer of the acting principal, revealed that Mr. Bacchus had failed his interview. In other words, he has the academic qualifications, but in the judgement of the interviewers he lacked certain qualities. What these qualities might be the TSC spokesperson didn't say, apparently content with innuendo. But, unless he engineered the whole protest himself, the fact that Mr. Bacchus was able to impress the students in such a short time implies that the TSC missed something crucial about the man's effectiveness as an educator.
I also find it significant that no commentator, including those who are always talking about the need to reform the education system, found anything positive to say about the students. Instead, the focus has been on the misspelled signs and the racial comments some of them allegedly made. But, to my mind, the misspelling emphasises the school's need for good leadership, while the racial comments are to be expected since that is what they hear from adults in political contexts. Human beings are naturally inclined to bigotry: a good education system would teach children to defy such societal norms.
But, despite all the talk about educational reforms, the hypocritical adults in charge of this place don't really want changes that would upset the status quo. Surely some credit must go to the students for having the initiative and the courage to organise themselves to make their wishes known. And don't tell me that the students should instead have written a letter or formed a delegation: the fact that policemen were called out, the comment about Mr. Bacchus by the TSC, the gobbledygook from the Education Ministry &endash; all this tells us exactly how such a letter or delegation would have been treated. No, the SFCS students understand our culture and they knew that the only way to draw attention to their cause was to have a protest demonstration. Our leaders, by habitually treating rational and civilised approaches with contempt, have made it so.
So, when we talk about the problem of a lack of discipline in schools, we must lay the fault right where it belongs: not with the students, but with the adults who are in charge of our education system. For, if children were properly educated, so they wouldn't misspell simple words like "trouble" or make racial comments, then discipline would not be a problem. Bertrand Russell, in an essay titled 'Useless' Knowledge, said, "Now while it must be admitted that highly educated people can sometimes be cruel, I think there can be no doubt that they are often less so than people whose minds have lain fallow. The bully in a school is seldom a boy whose proficiency in learning is up to average. When a lynching takes place, the leaders are almost invariably very ignorant men. This is not because mental cultivation produces positive humanitarian feelings, though it may do so; it is rather because it gives other interests than the ill-treatment of neighbours, and other sources of self-respect than the assertion of domination."
So one of the most effective ways to reduce indiscipline is to create a school culture where knowledge is valued. But how are we to do that when the wider society has no love of learning? As I have said before in this series, we must deliberately introduce norms in school which are in opposition to the wider community. In the medium-term, however, one of the best strategies for maintaining school discipline at secondary level is to set up a discipline council, which is made up of students and teachers.
In this model, offences are divided into three levels, ranging from mild to serious. Teachers deal directly with Level One transgressions, while vice-principals or deans deal with Level Two incidents. Level Three offences &endash; such as fighting, bullying, vandalism, cheating, non-attendance, recurrent defiance of authority &endash; go before the council. "The student's conduct is analysed, and all the people involved in an incident &endash; including teachers &endash; find their behaviour scrutinised," explains Gurian. "Generally the student is required by a vote of peers to make redress (and is sometimes suspended). Occasionally, a teacher's behaviour is found wanting and the incident is seen in this light."
Unfortunately, implementing this kind of system requires respect for youths and a democratic mindset: both of which are clearly beyond the majority of persons who come to power in this place.
Ending education
In this essay, I have looked at its history, its ideology, the impact of religion and race, the issue of life and sex education and the psychological ideas that should inform these topics, teacher training, and the pressing concern of school discipline. In each section, I have tried to identify key shortcomings and to suggest solutions.
The essay has not come out exactly as I intended. This is more often the case than not: the writing process is itself revelatory. When I began, I didn't intend to write more than six parts. Yet I now realise that I could continue on this topic almost indefinitely. Education, like crime, is an issue which relates to every aspect of our lives. So the essay has turned out to be merely an outline.
I'd originally aimed to write pieces which emphasised practical pedagogy and which were theoretically rigorous. But with every theme I kept bouncing my head on philosophical concerns. And I realised that, in a very real sense, it is a lack of philosophical coherence which explains why pedagogical measures have failed to bring about meaningful change in our education system. Well-intentioned reforms do not make any real impact primarily because the people in authority are ideologically effete. The typical attitude was most recently expressed by retired UWI lecturer Professor John Spence, who often writes on education issues in the Express. "I do not believe in a revolutionary approach," he says. "But I do believe that by sensible and appropriate interventions, revolutionary changes can result." Spence fails to realise that, given the failings of the system, any sensible and appropriate interventions must by definition be revolutionary.
I had also not intended to be overly critical of the educational authorities: indeed, I made it my business to identify those persons whose ideas I think are worth attending to. But, as I wrote, it occurred to me that I was saying harsh things &endash; about the Education Ministry and the Teaching Service Commission and UWI and TTUTA &endash; that the education experts and practitioners may well have agreed with but which, for reasons of practical politics, they would never say out loud.
Me, I am immensely impolitic and I don't have a PhD, so I doubt anybody with the power to change things is going to pay any attention to what I've written here. But my primary duty is to the readers, and in any case a writer, whose job it is to synthesise ideas from a variety of sources and express them vigorously, can only hope to plant seeds that, even if it takes a generation or two, eventually bear fruit. So, living in hope, I will conclude this series by listing some of the additional ideas which I think need to be implemented.
First and foremost: never blame students for the deficiencies of the system. Always blame the adults, from teachers to school supervisors to technocrats right up to the Education Minister.
Do a survey to find out what students' wants are. Such a survey will most likely find the following: young people want to be taught social skills, especially about romance and etiquette, how to fix things, self-defence, and how to find a job. Subject-wise, they probably will want more arts teaching, such as drama and drawing and music.
Implement Servol's Adolescent Development Programme in all secondary schools.
The norms taught in school must deliberately contravene certain norms of the wider society. In science subjects, teachers must emphasise the need for logical analysis, scepticism, and proof. In humanities subjects, teachers must show the impact of history, geography, culture, and economics on the human personality.
Large schools breed bad behaviour. The student body must be broken into manageable groups, no bigger than 150 persons, through a house system or other means.
Do not re-introduce corporal punishment. Each school should set up a discipline council made up of teachers, parents, and students.
Make teacher training mandatory.
The same teacher should teach the same class from Standards One through Five. The same teacher should teach most subjects to the same class from Forms One to Three; if this can't be implemented, students should have the same Form Teacher for these years.
In all schools if possible, but definitely in problem schools if not, all teachers should have an aide present in the classroom.
Implement a substitute teacher system, so no class is ever without supervision.
Introduce formal programmes to help slow learners.
Teaching methods must recognise innate differences between boys and girls. Most boys are innately less verbal and more visual and action-oriented than girls. Girls prefer to work in cooperative groups; boys are motivated by working in groups in competition with other groups.
Boys must be encouraged to read, through the use of popular literature and by exposing them to masculine mentors who like reading.
Girls must be encouraged in maths and science, preferably by working in all-female classes for these subjects.
Sex education must start when kids are still in primary school, before their hormones kick in.
These are just some of the basic reforms which I believe must be implemented if we want to create an effective education system, which can also catalyse social change. But the most basic and crucial reform is for all the players, but especially the teachers, to adopt a different philosophical approach: one based on rational and humanistic principles. Otherwise, all our talk about change and progress is mere posturing. And, with that, I done teach.
Copyright ©2004 Kevin Baldeosingh