Fair Comment by Best? Pt II
November 30, 2003
by Dr Winford James
So, despite a clear insufficiency of time (some 45 minutes) to focus on anything, and despite a view like mine that the education, training, and innovation (ETI) system of the Caribbean in general and Trinidad and Tobago in particular was not producing enough innovators to make our economy really competitive internationally, Lloyd Best swept aside the entire TV6 panel on the 'crisis in education' as being ignorant and innocent of the 'real issue'. For him, the real issue is that the entire society (except himself), but the high-achieving elites in particular, is trapped in paradigms and formulations imported from the North, has no clue as to how to properly interpret Caribbean realities or as to how to use 'Caribbean perception, observation and interpretation of reality to come to grips with ourselves', and is willing to 'play the game of an almost involuntary self-contempt'.
But alas, he only stipulates that that is the real issue; he does not show how or why it is. Instead, he takes the opportunity to tell us, for the umpteenth time, what his formulation of the Caribbean problem is, diverting in the process to, among other things, 1) profile Principal Tewarie as being able to hold his own on the international stage despite showing 'little grasp of the theory or history required to raise his colleagues to serious debate'; 2) to advise us on what the job of principal of UWI, St. Augustine requires; and 3) to dismiss, yet again, the measures proposed by writers from School of Education as trite and non-strategic, though sensible at a particular level.
You'd expect a commentator who criticises others for missing the mark (as he sees it) to show, and not simply say, what the mark is. You look for the illustration in the first of two columns and you are frustrated at its absence. You go to the second and your frustration deepens. There you find more of the same - a stipulation of the mark or issue in the bosom of a global discourse that, true to character, profiles the Caribbean as a place where there is this chronic difficulty 'accepting the reality and primacy of our own selfhood', where the high-achieving graduate elites have a 'chronic incapacity to conceptualise and formulate outside of certain well-charted and validated paradigms and contours', and where they have allowed us to develop into a sad little 'clerkdom'.
The Caribbean may be a place where there is systematic self-contempt and where the elites are not really helping to elucidate our condition or inspiring the majority not so privileged to understand themselves or develop their own home-grown theories of self and their own solutions. But how do we come to know or understand that the self-contempt and self-ignorance despite decades of schooling and education are the 'real issue' in education as distinct from other issues? By merely being told that they are in descriptive commentary devoid of illustration and analytical supports, as well as of rebuttal of other issues presented as competition? And even if we were to accept Best's position, wouldn't we need to know, or be presented with some sense of, how to fix the problem?
But in two long columns on two consecutive days - with clearly the superior benefit of time, space, and opportunity for reflectiveness - Best rubbished a TV6 panel that had a mere 45 minutes, but gave neither an analysis of how the panellists' issues were the wrong ones nor a cogent, focused argument why his is right. He may have given the analysis and the argument in an earlier time, but his two-part commentary on the TV 6 panel 'fiasco' was the opportunity to provide them again and possibly renew them.
His approach throws up one or two ironies. One is that it is his theory of the Caribbean as a price-taking, import-intensive, slow-to-innovate plantation economy that mostly led me to present the opening view during the panel that the ETI system had failed to produce an innovative economy that could cause the Caribbean to prosper and compete successfully with the rest of the world, and that, consequently, there was a need to renovate the curriculum for innovation.
Another is that Best runs the very serious risk of being seen as a Voice of One in the matter of theoretic interpretation of the Caribbean condition, just as he has seen Caribbean premiers and prime ministers as Voices of One in their articulation and practice of governance.
Fair comment?
Part I | Part II
Archives / Winford James Homepage / Previous Page
^^ Back to top
|