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By Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Ph.D.
July 17, 2024
Consider these contradictions. Opening the Express on Tuesday, July 9, you are greeted by the blood-stained headline “Bloody Monday.” Then the subheadlines: “Triple murder shocks Tobago” and “Carlsonfield home invasion: son killed, father in danger.”
Then, one ventures to page three and sees the horror of the crimes: “This country must bring back hangings. So says a relative of Anselm Douglas, one of three murder victims shot three times Sunday night. The triple murder, the first of its kind to rock the island, brings Tobago’s murder death toll for 2024 to 15, one more than it lost in all of 2023.”
Our grief leader is shown here in his neat academic gown, cap and tassel on page 13. In an interesting speech to graduates of the University of the Southern Caribbean, “A Strong Will, a Boundless Future”, he spoke passionately about the large sums of money that the government has invested in higher education in Trinidad and Tobago.
Somehow he never talked about the quality of the education they received.
A further question is: what does our leader mean when he talks about Trinidad and Tobago’s “limitless future” depending on the education our students receive? Five days ago, the US State Department warned its citizens not to travel to Trinidad and Tobago “due to the prevalence of crime, including kidnapping”.
The warning came despite the fact that “more than 100 people were shot in Chicago over the July 4 weekend, 19 of them fatally, according to police” (ABC News, July 8).
The leader also claimed that “the educational arrangements for young people in Trinidad and Tobago are second to none in the region and I dare say in the world.”
He did not tell his audience the results of this education and what values it instilled in our students. Even the colonial authorities who sent missionaries to Africa in the 19th century to “civilize the natives” realized that they needed “a tried and approved method of imparting to them a proper education” to be successful (John McCannon Trew, The Desolation of Africa and the Restoration of Native Institutions, 1843).
While the leader is grateful for the contribution of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to the “educational sector of this country and region,” it would have been helpful for him to look at Michael Oliver Fisher’s book, The Development of Baptist Thought in the Jamaican Context (Master’s thesis, 2010), which explores the contribution of Baptists to Jamaica’s development and how they “rejected British nationalism and pledged support for the establishment of churches, educational institutions and indigenous settlements in Jamaica.”
If the education our young people receive is second to none in the world, then why has our country become such a terrible (perhaps an uncivilized) place to live in? If education and crime are “inversely proportional”, then why is the crime rate in Trinidad and Tobago still so high after we invest so many resources in education?
Education, formal or informal, should enable students to act purposefully and responsibly in their social environment. The surge in crime rates in our country indicates that young people are unable to respect the social values that are promoted as meaningful.
When a black student is dragged out of a graduation dinner for wearing her hair in cornrows, one has to ask, what values are we promoting? Does this mean we are teaching young people to hate themselves or to embrace values that are at odds with who they really are?
Professor Verene Shepherd, director of the Caribbean Community Centre for Reparations Studies, suggested that “history classes should be made compulsory in schools and that the case of Haiti must be fully considered in any discussion of reparations” ( Expressen, July 9).
Since the late 1990s, when our Department of Education removed history from the curriculum and replaced it with social studies, we have experienced a devaluation of meaningful social values.
A nation that does not know its own history cannot know who it is, and that is why we have a lost generation.
Perhaps we should stop defining formal education so closely tied to how much money we make and the privileges it confers on us. Perhaps we should discuss what it means to be an educated person in Trinidad and Tobago.
As a young person (not a young professional), I learned more from the public speaking of Eric Williams and CLR James than I did from the assigned textbooks in school.
Let us also restore the tradition of public education and see how much we can learn from each other in private and public spaces.
Those who claim to be leaders should consider the message they send to those who expect to follow. The message they send certainly needs to be synchronized.
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