Some people talk about ladders. Others seem to be talking about snakes.
This article is not about the game, nor is it about people whom De Great Carew described as “dirty and slimy”. It is about how we can try to create a more societally sensitive journey for those who have made the climb through free (or taxpayer-underwritten bargain-price) tertiary education or are making it.
Whenever the issue of payment for tertiary education comes up, no small number of people throw in the accusation that people who significantly benefited from free access want to kick down the ladder so that others cannot similarly benefit.
How can on| assuredly move from someone saying that what they got free should be paid for in different times to judging the reason for their saying it as their bad-mindedness? That is to dive into the murky waters of hard-to-determine motive, always a dangerous thing.
Far better to eschew judging motive and instead look to discern more clear-cut behavioural tendencies and their implications.
And if our graduates of the free do not make special post-graduation “repayment” to their generous sponsors, we should be reflecting on the reasons for the absence of extraordinary give-back and planning for a better way forward.
A lot of things go wrong because, for all our noble-mindedness, we do not consider interrelations, do not pay attention to possible side effects and long-term repercussions, do not carefully evaluate our premises and do not have specific goals. Those failures have significantly contributed to our present situation.
For one thing, we should consider how our hierarchical use of a national assessment test at age eleven (called by the hopeful but ironically inaccurate name Common Entrance Examination) has fed the appetite for a sense of superiority over (and therefore, in fact, disconnection from) others.
When you give the best of the products of that approach the opportunity of free tertiary education, why should you think that, without a potent redirecting, they have been prepped for noble commitment to fellow citizens?
Yes, we were fiercely ridding ourselves of non-egalitarian strictures of class and race – but we had tunnel vision, failing to recognize any dangers and not giving due consideration to other important things like social cohesiveness, emotional and psychological well-being, charity, giving back (which I am always telling wunna is different from charity) and community-mindedness.
We were not as clear-sighted as the evil slave master bringing some of the slaves into his house. He had a broad view of the implications.
We, possessed of principle, wore blinkers even as we opened the way to free education, for we kept firmly in place another insidious elitist foundation – hierarchy. How do you nurture a sturdy sense of gratitude and commitment to others in a cradle of better-than?
And later as we garbed ourselves in the clothes of nationhood we did not imbue our people with a strong sense of the togetherness aspect of being a nation. The Independence project has been more about “we run things now”, pomp and ceremony and merrymaking and folkways than about what I have called “profound kindredness”/“a deep mystical sense of affinity”. Where in our celebrations (and in our daily living out) has there been an intense focus on the latter?
That is why the trumpeting of “Barbados is a society and not just an economy” while failing to flesh out the communityness inherent in the claim ignites my ire. It cannot be achieved through sporting fixtures, markets, carnivals and such, which bring people together but do not rear them in commitment to one another.
The school system must be made an essential team player in the development of that commitment and connectedness. One means I would highly recommend is volunteer work/community service as a major, fully integrated aspect of school life. Few other things can so develop a sensitivity to others and have the transformative power of carefully, consciously meeting needs.
So I am suggesting something of far greater scope than a Key Club here and a Red Cross link there – I mean a structured, focused thrust that is built into the very ethos of every school in Barbados.
The University of the West Indies must itself play a role in this redirection. Not only should volunteerism be a mark of students’ existence there, but a targeted preparation of students for either social marketing or social entrepreneurship should be pursued.
There are two other areas that space does not permit me to go into in any depth here.
One is the mining of literature for its great potential to build empathy. We must make our schoolchildren’s encounter with literature a genuinely people-centred engagement.
And we must produce sensitive, authentic portrayals of people-in-experience in our songs.
Of course, we have to drum it into the heads of Barbadians generally, and recipients of free or largely free tertiary education, in particular, that they owe a big debt of gratitude to the society. It en about individual flights of fancy.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor.