Peter F. Drucker, in texts such as The Frontiers Of Management, evoked the concept of “the knowledge society”. I have come to prefer a term associated with Sir Graham Hills who speaks of the “capable society”. I prefer to speak of “capability” rather than “knowledge” because it suggests a wider range of talents and abilities.
Knowledge has come to be associated with higher academic studies, with what Hills calls “specific knowledge specialization” in the humanities, advanced technology, the social and natural sciences.
One of the curious aspects emerging on the issue of financing university schooling is the apparent assumption that “social capital” is essentially or primarily a product of tertiary education at the university level.
Social capital has been defined as the accumulation of “positives” in any given society. It may be largely, but not solely, the product of formal schooling. Fareed Zakaria posits that in the United States, high social capital is more a facet of strong families and strong civic support systems and groups.
In Barbados our accumulated social capital, what the RSA Journal’s Mathew Taylor calls our “collective efficacy”, was very much a product of religion as a morally enervating social force that served to foster what cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker calls “the better angels of our nature”.
Social positives come in all forms, not just in knowledge. They may include creativity, good conduct, civility, a high work ethic, a sense of social commitment and other pro-social behaviours which reside in all kinds of persons, not just the so-called bright sparks. Some “bright” people are little more than “clever devils”.
Then there are the “negatives” across all societies: criminality, predatory violence, drug addiction, laziness, inefficiency, you name them, and again they reside to some degree in all of us. A society can be said to have a high level of social capital when the positives demonstrably outweigh the negatives and where the negatives do not approach a perceptibly critical mass. Children are differently gifted and varyingly creatively and morally engaged. We need to provide the opportunity for each child to maximize his or her particular capacity on both the cognitive and affective plains.
The idea that we build social capital primarily by financing university education for the more academically gifted is a contrived fallacy. This is particularly true when such financing is done at the expense of other potentialities.
Addressing the issue of declining social mobility in America, Fareed Zakaria noted that the United States has a lower rate of mobility than most North European states. Part of the problem is the way America funds education through property taxes. Thus schools in well-to-do areas with high property tax support are well funded.
Schools in poor, segregated cities are grossly underfunded, exacerbating other social disadvantages. The United States, says Fareed, spends disproportionately more on college education for the already advantaged than it does on black and Hispanic inner city kids.
We run the risk of a similar imbalance. If we don’t develop our children’s non-academic abilities, they will become “disabilities” with an accumulation of negatives that subtracts from the aggregate of our social capital.
As revealed in the Saturday Sun of August 17, the International Centre for Prison Studies has noted that in December 2012 Barbados had some 1 053 persons behind bars, with an incarceration rate of 379 out of 100 000 people, giving it a global ranking of 21st out of 223 nations and dependent states globally.
One of the more enlightened contributions in the recent Budget debate came from Mrs Mara Thompson who pointed out that while we lament the imposition of tuition fees for university students as some kind of “betrayal”, thousands of less academically able working class children are being shortchanged in the primary system where 30 per cent fail to master the basics of the primary curriculum because of a lack of compensatory remedial provision.
They invariably fail in the secondary system and a paucity of vocational education after 16 means they fail to maximize their potential, some turning to deviant behaviours that detract from our ability to fashion a broad-based capable society.
One of the problems with Jamaica is not that it lacks for university education, but that it has a substantial urban and rural underclass lacking basic schooling, submerged in its own sub-culture and increasingly alienated from the mainstream of Jamaican bourgeois society.
The post-colonial bourgeoisie has betrayed the black working class largely because it has seen social capital too exclusively as the product of higher academic schooling. Human capability and agency is multi-faceted. Education spending should not be the preserve of the academically inclined few at the expense of the less scholarly many.
• Ralph Jemmott is a retired educator and social commentator; email [email protected]
