In crisis conditions, one of the early casualties is intellectual clarity.
I refer to my respected colleague Clyde Mascoll’s critique of tertiary education in his column in the DAILY?NATION?(09/06/12), in which he proposed narrow specialization over traditional classical education.
Heaping folly upon folly was the Barbados Today’s editorial (09/11/12) which saw in Mascoll’s submission a brave critique of our education policy’s tendency to “certification”, which has failed to “produce great thinkers, innovators”, but to “simply provide employees”.
Lost upon the editor was the fact that it was Mascoll’s hostility to abstract thought which signalled the death of innovators and the rise of “employees”, as noted by David Comissiong.
More worrying was the Barbados Today’s descent into triviality in admiring a former University of the West Indies (UWI) student for his “refusal to research at UWI” because of the insistence on “submission of bibliography”. That student apparently, “had entered Cave Hill, not to be influenced by Locke, Machiavelli or Schopenhaur or to quote them to appear “learned”, but to think for himself and to himself be quoted one day”.
Advice to student: if you are not willing to test your ideas against an existing body of work, then confer upon yourself your own degree. One always reads for a degree. The academy insists on delving in past knowledge, not to “appear learned”, but to sharpen the “originality” of one’s assertions.
But there is a deeper dimension to this anti-UWI animus. Despite the appearance of “objectivity”, the debate on university education is sourced in the economic challenge of sustaining free education. Subjectively, those ideologically hostile to UWI are seizing the moment.
Clyde is not of that ilk, but he has given them fuel.
One enduring piece of anti-UWI propaganda is that the technical institutes produce more educated citizens than the UWI. Since many of these students eventually enter UWI, one is to assume that they are consequently “de-educated”.
It is in moments of crisis, however, that abstract thought is most necessary. We do not study Plato merely to quote him. Arthur Lewis could not have pioneered development economics without studying past economic thought. Our present weakness is not too much classical study, but too little. Today’s graduate of economics is typically a quantitative econometrician trained to measure, not to think.
Finally, one must reflect on the irony of history. Fifty years ago, it was standard fare of colonial policy to insist upon the provision of technical and vocational schools for the “education of the Negroes”. Our foreparents rejected this due to our relegation to the role of “hewers of wood and carriers of water”.
Sadly, 50 years after independence, in the midst of an epoch-ending economic crisis, our independent policymakers can do no better than to make a virtue of a colonial prescription which our grandfathers were astute enough to reject.
What utter folly!
• Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, specializing in regional affairs. Email [email protected]
