Life Sentences

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.