Though I “passed” for QRC as a student of
Curepe Presbyterian, I spent almost all my primary school life at Caroni
Presbyterian – a small, U-shaped, red-brick structure in the middle of a lush
canefield.
I grew up near UWI in St Augustine with a misty
morning view of Mt St Benedict. But it was the grazing bison of Caroni, the
sharp green leaves of the sugarcane and razor-grass, and the clackety-clack of
the cane train that remain among my most enduring primary school memories.
True, one day I saw a donkey being mercilessly
beaten as it reluctantly drew a cart full of grass or sugarcane. Five and a
half decades later, I still hear the crack of that whip on thick, defenceless
hide.
My grandfather, as Caroni headmaster, would
deliver assembly speeches that spoke of man’s inhumanity to man, justice,
equality, and the responsibilities of independence.
“The test of a man is the fight that he
makes,/The grit that he daily shows,/The way he stands upon his feet,/And takes
life’s numerous bumps and blows.” There I was at Queen’s Hall – hair shiny and
gripping my scalp, powder on my face and chest, clothes crisp and clean,
onstage, hands clasped, making Grandpa proud.
Contrastingly, the Curepe experience became
quickly queued for exit from memory. There is some fogginess surrounding those
few months. A sadistic teacher who threw a duster at a student. A girl who fell
on her way upstairs and busted her lip. And Jean Jacques who overturned a desk
and cussed the duster-throwing teacher.
But it was there I sat the Common Entrance
Examination and “passed” for QRC. A relative of mine had sat and “failed” two
years before.
Was it possible that the “bright boy” from
Caroni would follow? I didn’t. But there were those who had “failed” and
subsequently disappeared, unlike my relative who went on to become a quite
accomplished professional.
There were many tales to be told of the cruelty
of Common Entrance at that time. How come Angela “failed”? And Rajin and
Egbert? Whatever happened to them? What were their life sentences?
At QRC we were trained to forget all that. On
the first day, our form teacher said the secondary school experience was about
learning and applying knowledge and was not about examinations and passing.
This was, I presumed, a perverse form of
therapy to help us forget those who had gone from view, and the depravities we
had witnessed.
We were left wondering what accounted for this
leap from cruelty to what appeared to have been a new reality. Of course, it
was all a lie. GCE turned out to be just as frantic and despairing. But that’s
another story. I will someday come to that.
Then, many years later, came the grand
transition from the Common Entrance to SEA – a process presumably guided by
work that blended data, enlightened, learned contemplation, and political will.
It was all there in the press releases!
However, there were serious educationists who
remained silently sceptical and others who wrote about virtual sleight of hand.
Children, you see, were still effectively “passing” or “failing” or being
forgotten.
Social psychologist, Prof. Ramesh Deosaran has
written about the “humanitarian violation” resulting from the combined effects
of the SEA and the presence of “Concordat-governed schools.”
I also have a copy of educationist Prof. Jerome
De Lisle’s paper on Secondary School Examinations in the Caribbean. In it, he
surmises that the current system “ignores the measurement limitations of
high-stakes achievement tests, the threat of unintended consequences, and the
inequalities in opportunities to learn that persist throughout the system.”
In essence, these two experts are rendering
bare what some of us untrained observers have long suspected. That though the
donkey carts have gone away, and the dusters unlikely to be released with force
at students, there is an underlying cruelty that persists together with
verdicts that span a long time – life sentences.
Latterly, those who note the move in Barbados
to abolish the Common Entrance are these days barely recognising the
differences SEA ostensibly produced. They do so even as they call for its
corresponding withdrawal here.
The important differences between the two
systems to combat the fallibility of “test-based early selection”, as De Lisle
once noted, have apparently not relieved the pain they were meant to
ameliorate.
This is among the things these new times cannot
fail to address. I am not hearing much from all concerned to engender the
required confidence.
