The new Minister of Educational Transformation has publicly stated that it is his intention to take legislation to Parliament relating to education reform by the end of this calendar year, December 31, 2025. It is a tall order. Nine months is not a long time to overhaul the architecture of an entire educational edifice.
Minister Chad Blackman has also stated that it is his intention to hold broad-based consultations with ‘all stakeholders’ in the educational system. These would include students, parents, and teachers. He has already met with student council representatives at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre. Whatever shape the discussions take, it must be clear that there will be differences of opinion on the way forward. Given the breakdown of much of the socio-cultural consensus in Barbados, it is unlikely that there will be a uniformity of opinion on any proposed change. Education itself is a very complex issue. Persons can have differing notions of the purpose and content of formal schooling. Schooled in the humanities and social sciences, I tend to favour an education that emphasises the liberal arts and the need ‘to be’ in the best sense of ‘being.’
There persists a notion that consultations are a cover for decisions that have already been reached by the power that be. There should be no doubt that Mr Blackman has been appointed with the mandate to abolish the 11-Plus. What may be at stake is what exactly will replace that exam, and what would be most politically agreeable to the governing political elite and its leadership. In Barbados, everything is politics and politics is everything.
The Minister has apparently agreed to take a look at the so-called grooming policy followed by the last holder of that office. Ms Kay McConney’s policy has not gone down well with the public at large. Clearly, the injunction that hair should be ‘neat and tidy’ has not been followed, at least not to the approval of many. The Chief Education Officer Dr Ramona Archer-Bradshaw stated that the policy came into being when, during COVID-19, many boys had grown and styled their hair ‘differently’ during school closures. She concluded that, “there was a need for us to relook the grooming policy at that time”. One might ask what the pressing need to ‘relook’ the existing policy was. It seems as if it was a policy of ‘if you can’t beat them then join them,’ or, in another current phrasing, ‘meet them at where they are’ — whatever that means. This all under a Minister of Education who never seemed to have come to grips with the inner workings of her ministry and the educational sector as a whole.
The revised 2023 National Grooming Policy spawned a number of hirsute results. Teachers complained that while at first boys would plait their hair, after a while it seemed as if they had just woken up and come to school with little or no evidence of anything remotely resembling grooming. With plaits covering their foreheads, some teachers complained that they could not tell the difference between a ‘fine-featured boy’ from a ‘fine-featured’ girl. Is someone or somebody deliberately promoting an androgenic identity–and why?
The girls took to wearing excessive extensions to their hair and other adornments. One student, I am told, took to wearing full makeup to school, lip gloss and all.
So much of educational discourse ignores the socio-cultural realities that determine schooling outcomes. Some time in the 1970s, we moved away from education to focus on certification and accreditation, education for upward social mobility, money and status, the two prevailing gods of contemporary rat-race Barbadian society. Not that there is anything wrong with upward mobility, but as one American professor told his students, “Don’t let your education get in the way of your education”.
Instead of sticking to and reinforcing the set standards of the school, which had served us well, the education authorities chose to relax those standards, pandering to the lowest common denominator on the grounds that it is part of the process of decolonisation in a search for an authentic Afro-Caribbean identity. As might have been expected, given an inch, some of the young people decided to take a yard. One defender of the relaxed standard, in a call to Down to Brass Tacks, stated that children do not learn with their hair. That untutored mind was clearly unacquainted with the psychology of education, which is an extremely complex discourse. Learning must always include the affective domain, the inculcation of what the collective society deems vital to its moral and spiritual survival. Attitude affects altitude, determining how high a student will climb. As a caller to Down to Brass Tacks on Tuesday, April 8, said, children have to be in a frame of mind to learn. Anything that distracts from that frame of mind disengages the child from the willingness and capacity to learn, both cognitively and affectively.
Barbados seems to be suffering a spiritual collapse. I read somewhere recently that “managerialism is not leadership”. One is not convinced that any political regime in Barbados is willing or competent to transform this country’s psycho-social environment in the more meaningful sense of the term ‘transformation’.
I am frightfully aware that I am part of a generation about to make its exit. As the late Robert Best used to say, “It’s a sobering thought”. In the age of climate change, perhaps one has to become acclimatised to the new Barbados characterised by crime and violence, all forms of thievery, apathy and indifference. The old Barbados is fading away and being laid to rest in churchyards and cemeteries across Barbados daily. Maybe I am attending too many funerals as the passing parade continues.
Ralph Jemmott is a respected, retired educator and commentator on social issues.
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