Stuck in a plantation mindset
I LEARNED to read at age five. Both my parents subscribed to weekly or monthly magazines (Popular Mechanics, Woman’s Own, Readers’ Digest) and were avid readers of newspapers and books. I looked over their shoulders and showed an interest, and they not only taught me to read, but provided me with reading material – Hardy Boys, Rick Brant, Tom Swift, Biggles, as well as Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, King Arthur and his Merrie Men, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the like.
In my first week at school, I was promoted three classes (grades); I took the Common Entrance Examination (CEE) at age eight, and entered first form at Campion College at age nine. I love to read, and until today gain much pleasure and enjoyment from delving into matters historical and religious, and concerning human and social development.
And then there is the application of logic and other analytical tools to what is read.
At any given time I have a bagful of books and journal articles waiting to be read, as well as (nowadays) an Inbox full of pdfs and blogs. I have never had the time to hang out on street corners.
Reading has been my gateway to the world! And to the world of learning!
This is why I am so bothered by recent data showing that one-third of Jamaican students at the end of their primary school careers still cannot read.
We know that education and literacy has been a hot political and social issue for the last three hundred years in this carefully put together cash cow called Jamaica. The original intention in settling this island was not to build a nation, but rather a plantation to grow crops which would not grow in temperate Europe. The business plan called for the planting material, the technology, and the necessary labour to be assembled here as a place of convenience.
UNSKILLED LABOUR
The planters who ran Jamaica needed unskilled manual labour; education for their African enslaved labour was never part of their plan. It was the nonconformist churches seeking to evangelise the enslaved that first offered literacy training and education to their members.
When Jamaica’s first Education Act was debated in the Jamaica House of Assembly, one assemblyman made this very revealing statement: “Emancipation has removed the whip; we must now control their minds through education.” Since Jamaican estates could not operate without unskilled manual labour, the planter-controlled Assembly put strategies in place to ensure that the former slaves stayed on the sugar plantations and coffee estates to work. Educated men and women would not work as manual labourers, and so an “education system” had to be put in place for black people that would focus on “manual training” rather than academic pursuits, and which would focus on the virtues of obedience and respect, which would produce a docile and compliant working class.
Uneducated workers would more readily lap up the platform rhetoric of shallow selfaggrandising politicians.
This was the mindset right up to end of the colonial period. At so-called“Independence” Jamaica had 41 high schools (you had to pass the CEE to get in) and eight Senior Schools; by 1970 we had one less high school (Texas Branch College in St James closed) and 50 Junior Secondary Schools built with borrowed World Bank money; to get in you had to fail the CEE. Even after Independence there was no serious plan to provide Jamaican children with top-class (primary or) secondary education.
That “education system” designed by Jamaica’ s planter-politicians is still with us today, and it is still achieving the goals of its designers.
FREE OURSELVES
Jamaica’s education system (and economy) will not improve until we free ourselves from the plantation mentality, which demands an education system producing unskilled labour for field and factory labour, waiters and housekeepers for the tourism industry, and low-level free zone and BPO workers.
If in the 1960s the government had built fifty top-class high schools in town and country, turning out scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, where would Jamaica be today? We would have a much larger middle class (like our Caribbean neighbours) and much less crime. We would have to import unskilled labour into a booming economy. Jamaica is still suffering from this backward decision of the Jamaica Labour Party government of the 1960s.
We focus on the fact that several of our Caribbean neighbours have done away with the monarchy; focus also on who has done away with their sugar industry, which tied up thousands of acres of arable land and devalued their citizenry!
Before and after Emancipation, part of the enmity between the plantocracy and the missionaries was the fact that the Church provided good-quality education to poor black people. That tension still exists today.
Government schools cannot do what church schools have been doing, because the ethos of church schools is somewhat different, including fostering good family life which reinforces the school. The denomination of which I am a member has a mandate to form character, to develop all the facets of the whole person (physical, intellectual, social, cultural, moral, spiritual). This is what makes church schools special, and why even secular, anti-religious people want to send their children to church schools.
No government-owned entity ranks in the top ten high schools, and there is only one (founded in 1935) in the top 30. Jamaica’s best schools are operated by churches and trusts, with some funding from the government.
We have before us the Patterson Report on Education (2021) and the World Bank/UNICEF Report (2021); both tell us what we already know: all Jamaican governments since Independence have done a poor job at delivering good-quality education; the people of Jamaica have not received a fair return for the tens of billions which have been spent over the decades on government schools.
The fact is that Jamaican Churches and Trusts are delivering top-quality educational outcomes to the highest international standards. It is not the churchowned and operated primary schools that are largely turning out illiterates. I ask myself: is it that the government is unwilling to offer an efficient and effective education system? Or that they cannot?
I have a simple suggestion to the Government: franchise poorperforming government schools to churches and educational trusts with good track records. Things can only get better.