Maurice Bishop & Chris Searle 1981 Grenada: Education is a Must
Our powerful glare
Will be raised
So give a little thanks and praise
We are stepping forward
By fanning the blaze
Of a revealing fire
Answering the demand
Through popular expression
Of a painful deep desire.
When old 'Nezer family
Wrote 'im letters
He used to be shame
But now as we bursting
Through fetters
He read an' write
Happy and plain.
For centuries
Them big belly bandits
Made us shit
Made us vomit
Made us crawl on we knees
Them trampled we potential
To astounding degrees
Them politrickal pimps
Did just the same
They trampled we down
In poverty and shame.
From Sauteurs to Point Saline
Illiteracy's ugly form was seen
When poor farmers went to the Bank
The privileged few used to grin at
Their ignorance
Hard working fishermen
Used to bawl for mercy
In the frustrating grasp
Of illiteracy.
But now our Revolution
By passing that stage
A deprived people
Now express their rage
As we march into
A new an' bright age
All Grenadians learn to read
All Grenadians learn to write
To respond to the need
To stand an' fight.
We are poor but proud
That is why
We are burning that shroud
Which has covered us in darkness
In humble hypnosis
We are burning that blanket
Which hid us from the world
The poor simple people
Is time for dey control
We pioneering new paths
By jooking dem Ligarou
Hard in dey hearts.
Garvin Nan Tambu Stuart[1]
Note: Ligarou - vampire
This poem, by a young Grenadian militant, amply expresses the enormous determination of the Grenadian Revolution to fulfill the promises of 'permanent education' for the Grenadian people to which Brother Bishop often refers. 'There is no liberation without Education', proclaim posters throughout the country, 'Education is a must!', 'If you know, teach. If you don't, learn.'
Throughout the colonial years in Grenada, education was largely a means of sifting off an elite to be assimilated into a mimicry of the 'mother country's' way of life, and thus become useful local appendages to British Imperialism. As the threat of self-government loomed for the British, such 'civilised' Grenadians would then naturally be earmarked as candidates for an acquiescent neo-colonial government. For the rest of the population there were the elementary schools, many of which were started by the Catholic, Anglican or Methodist Churches. Many children drifted out of these schools, often in the third or fourth grade, through financial necessity and the need to make a contribution to the meagre family income. In a speech made at the National Education Conference in St. George's in duly, 1979, Brother Bishop had these comments to make about colonial education:
"Perhaps the worst crime that Colonialism left our country, has indeed left all former colonies, is the Education System. This was so because the way in which that system developed, the way in which that system was used, was to teach our people an attitude of self-hate, to get them to abandon our history, our culture, our values. To get them to accept the principles of white superiority, to destroy our confidence, to stifle our creativity, to perpetuate in our society class privilege and class difference. The colonial masters recognise very early on that if you get a subject people to think like they do, to forget their own history and their own culture to develop a system of Education that is going to have relevance to their outward needs and be almost entirely irrelevant to our internal needs, then they have already won the job of keeping us in perpetual domination and exploitation. Our Educational process, therefore, was used mainly as a tool of the ruling elite."[2]
The onset of Gairyism only intensified these tendencies. Education became an almost magical concept, associated with going away, becoming a 'big man', identifying even more closely with the eurocentric and metropolitan vision and creating a dream of alienation from work, production and the people. Education became associated with another reality, to escape from the islands. The local world was spurned and rejected, 'certification' was all, and the people's money spent on educating the country's annual 'island scholar', was simply exported when the successful scholars, instead of returning to help develop Grenada, stayed on in the colonial metropolis and worked there.
The same 'certification', being entirely separated from actual production, became a guarantee against local development, both educationally and economically. Throughout the years of Gairy, leading up to and after Independence in 1974, Grenada lost some of its greatest intellectual potential to Europe and North America, after the people themselves had borne the heavy cost of educating the emigrants. Simultaneously, the rote learning and alienated context of study enforced upon Grenadian students by foreign curricula and external examinations anaesthetized aspirations towards genuine national development:
"... while cramming the necessary books and learning everything by heart in order to pass the exam, we ourselves did not realise that in the process we were being paralysed instead of being taught creatively."[3]
While European mimicry was being encouraged at the level of elitist secondary education - which was out of the financial reach of the mass of the population, what with the cost of fees, transport, school books and uniforms - Gairy allowed primary schools to physically collapse, their desks to fall apart and not be replaced, teaching conditions to become a nightmare and the majority of teachers to remain unqualified. As this was happening, thousands of dollars which should have gone to support the educational budget was being siphoned off and squandered by himself and his hirelings. All over Grenada the results of his educational policies are still apparent, in the shape of dilapidated school furniture, cramped and overcrowded classrooms, damaged and unusable toilets and leaky galvanised roofs. Despite the enormous work and local successes of new government's School Renovation Programme, when parents, teachers and the students themselves put in over a million dollars' worth of labour time to work on the schools in their villages, the ravages of the Gairy era remain and many schools are badly in need of new facilities and buildings. One principal recently pointed out an old, rutted bench-desk to me in her school which had the initials of her grandfather on it, scratched during the First World War.
As the schools literally fell apart, Gairy officially encouraged obscurantism, which he knew could take root in the fertile soil of ignorance and illiteracy. His own dabbling in superstitious practices of 'obeah' created irrational confusion and fear amongst the people. This was given bogus scientific reinforcement by his claims of studying and being an authority on Unidentified Flying Objects. The relics of this are still to be seen in a bookshop in St. George's today: half a shelf of unsold copies of various paperbacks about U.F.O.s!
Despite his proclamations of being a friend of Grenadian agriculture and the agricultural workers - with whose support he had come to power - Gairy's government made no attempt to introduce the principle of the integration of Education with Production. His policies fostered the idea that working the soil was humiliating and worthy only of the uneducated. So those few who became 'certificated', as Brother Bishop has said, soon accepted the idea that:
"...instead of getting wet under a cocoa tree, all of them could come into town, put on a tie and go in the civil service. And with that sort of parasitic thinking, with that sort of deformed policy, naturally the result was the creation of deformed individuals who could not fit into the real Grenada they were coming out to face...
What can be more ridiculous than the fact that it is possible in 1979 in Grenada for the vast, vast majority of the students who leave secondary school in the country that is said to be primarily agricultural, in a country that produces the richest cocoa in the world, that is the second largest producer of nutmeg in the world, for a child to leave secondary school with a certificate in Latin and French, but who has never seen a cocoa tree in his life or has never climbed one or cut a pod or does not know what the importance of bananas, nutmegs and cocoa is for our country
...but who leaves school with a nice certificate in his hand and makes an application to the Public Service Commission only to be told that there are no more vacancies, so he has to go out on to the road and lime."[4]
It was a type of Education divorced from the real, mundane problems that surrounded and harassed the people every day of their lives: no piped water, persistent rain and wind damage, villages still unelectrified, nutritional deficiencies, adult and child illiteracy, school and medical fees, starvation wages and backward technology. Clearly, whatever kind of new Education system was needed in Grenada, it had to be allied with a problem-solving approach which married theory with practice to tackle the difficulties faced by the mass of the people. And because it needed to solve the problems of the people, it also needed their active engagement and enthusiasm. It needed to be a part of
"...a participatory democracy that seeks to involve all of our people: workers, farmers, fishermen, youths, students, women; all of them on a regular on-going basis in making decisions and coming up with solutions for the problems that we have identified as being the real problems that are holding us back."[5]
The speech of Brother Bishop which follows this brief commentary includes an inventory of the educational advances made in Grenada since the March 13th Revolution, so here I shall point to the processes and initial achievements of the two major educational programmes that were launched in 1980, which the People's Revolutionary Government heralded as the 'Year of Education and Production'. These are the Centre for Popular Education (C. P. E.) and the National In-Service Teacher Education Programme (N. I. S. T. E. P.).
When the first stage of the C.P.E. classes began in August 1980, after several months of preparation and recruitment of volunteers, estimates arising out of national surveys conducted by the literacy workers themselves showed illiteracy in Grenada to be between five and seven per cent. By November of the same year 2,738 illiterates had registered for classes, fifty-eight per cent of whom were men and forty two per cent women. Committees for Popular Education were organised all over the country at the village level, composed of volunteer teachers and headed by a village Co-ordinator, who would normally be a practising teacher, and a Village Technician. The committees meet on a weekly basis to monitor the progress of the classes and to discuss and resolve any organisational or pedagogical problems. The Parish Co-ordinators and Technicians direct the work in the seven parishes of the nation, and the teaching materials and pedagogical approaches are worked out by the six-member National Technical Commission - which regularly organises seminars at the parish level.
Such democratic structures not only hold the literacy campaign together and ensure that the blood pumps freely between the head and body of the programme, but they give the participants a genuine apprentice- ship in practical democratic power. Woven into the C.P.E. is a rich cultural upsurge of songs, poetry and dance which are performed at village emulation meetings, celebrations to end phases of study and inaugurate new ones. The campaign has given thousands of Grenadians, young and old, not only a popular-based educational movement, but real and profound skills of organising themselves democratically in new infrastructures and creating young cadres eager to serve the people. As Minister of Education Brother George Louison has emphasised, the C.P.E. has entered deep into the lives of the people, creating new revolutionary arteries:
"The literacy campaign is a democratic challenge of the Revolution which has to be completed in order for us to move forward in education.
Our workers must become a conscious, productive and united force understanding their role in the fight for better living for all our people.
Our youth must see themselves as the builders of the future, participating and assisting those who did not have the opportunity which they now have.
Our women, who comprise more than fifty per cent of our C.P.E. volunteers, must see themselves teaching their fellow-sisters to overcome the many problems that have held our women in bondage for so many years.
Our farmers, our fishermen, every section of our society must see the C. P. E. as being an important and vital tool in the effort to lift production and for our people to learn more."[6]
And the Revolution makes no secret of the fact that the function of the C. P. E. goes well beyond the skills of learning how to read and write. They are but the beginning of the process of creating a new mentality:
"The C. P. E. is not just reading and writing, it is also about consciousness, about developing a nation that, for the first time, will begin to put proper values on those things that are important. That will begin, for example, to love, to respect and to admire our ordinary workers, our ordinary poor people, our ordinary fishermen . . . We must develop a love for our country, a love for our neighbours, a love for our Revolution. That is the kind of education we must begin to develop."[7]
The C. P. E. has also given Grenada its first internationalist volunteer workers. Ceford Robertson and John Wilson, two C. P. E. teachers, are now in Nicaragua, teaching basic English literacy in the Bluefields region of that country, on its Caribbean coast-line where English is the lingua franca. So the fraternal aid from such sources as Paulo Freire, Jamaica's JAMAL literacy programme and that in Cuba which advised and helped create the base for the C. P. E. in Grenada, has now resulted in Grenadians helping to consolidate the Nicaraguan Revolution. In this context, Caribbean people are indeed seeing the unity and truth of the axiom: KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.
The following interview was conducted with Grenada's youngest C. P. E. volunteer teacher, twelve year-old Lyndon Adams of L'esterre village, Carriacou parish. In September 1980 he began to teach three classes a week to his seventy three year-old student, Mrs. Ladyan Liverpool, in the same village. By February 1981, the first stage of the programme was completed, and at present he is waiting to begin the second stage, equivalent to primary school education, with a syllabus that contains basic Mathematics, English, Grenadian History and Natural Science. Lyndon's words illustrate how literacy and consciousness, for both the teacher and the taught, go hand in hand in the C. P. E.:
SEARLE: Why did you join the C.P.E.?
ADAMS: I joined it to help out the literacy programme, to teach certain persons to be revolutionary. You see, some people who can't read and write can't understand the standards the Revolution is trying to upraise. I also wanted to make them understand why the Revolution came about, and the benefits that it brings to us.
SEARLE: What are these standards the Revolution is trying to upraise?
ADAMS: Trying to wipe out illiteracy and superstition. If you are well-educated you would understand that superstitions like jumbies and other things like obeah aren't true. Then you could read the Bible and know how God protects you.
Also, trying to understand about counter-revolutionaries, and capitalist and imperialist countries that try to take control of our own land.
Then the Revolution makes us understand about co-operative farming. So if you're not working then you could get yourself work. Now if you're involved in the C. P. E. and then involved in co-operative farming it would break down inflation. Not working is a part of inflation, and if you're working on a co-operative farm then you produce more and make inflation less.
SEARLE: How does the C.P.E. fight counter revolution?
ADAMS: If you are illiterate you wouldn't understand what the Revolution is trying to do to bring about change and improve the standard of the people. If you're not literate, counters would try to fill your head that the Revolution is not a good move. So then the counters might tell you that when they turn back the revolution they would-have a better country, and make you think that it is good to be on their side. So, when you're literate you begin to understand what they're trying to do.
SEARLE: What are they trying to do?
ADAMS: Killing people and de-stabilising the country.
SEARLE: What do you mean by de-stabilizing?
ADAMS: Trying to break down the economy and terrorise the minds of the people.
SEARLE: You talked about 'Imperialism'. Can you explain that to me?
ADAMS: It is when the big countries, for example the U.S., Britain, Canada and some other countries we export our products to, establish branches of stores and banks in countries like Grenada, and with these try to oppress the people by giving them low prices for their products. For example, limes: if you sell them a pound of limes for maybe about a dollar, they might sell the same pound for five dollars to other countries.
SEARLE: How do you set about teaching Mrs. Liverpoo!?
ADAMS: When we started, she could write her name and a few things, so she was semi-literate. I saw her three times a week at about five o'clock in the evening after school. She lives in my village. I go there with my manual and my reader, and with a pen. She would have a reader and a pencil. Then we would take a lesson, study it and try to understand it, then answer the questions written in the book.
When I teach her to write better, I would then ask her the questions orally and she would answer them and write them in her exercise book.
SEARLE: What can she write now?
ADAMS: She can write big words like 'doctor', 'dentist', 'Caribbean' and 'communities' and constructive sentences like, 'I went in the garden today', 'We all work to build a new Grenada' and 'We grow more food to build the Revolution'.
SEARLE: How do you think that learning to read and write at her age of 73 is changing her life?
ADAMS: It's making her understand more things that go on in her life. Now she reads the Bible and she would know what God teaches, and she would know how to understand it and exercise it - like not lying or stealing things from other people. And now she is no longer illiterate she is proud of herself and when people say to her, 'This C. P. E. programme ent no good' she turns to them and she says: 'It ent no good? Then how I become a literate person?'
And since she became literate she is putting fertiliser on the soil. She read about it and understands why that is important now. Also she's reading the Bible and pleasure books.
SEARLE: One of the C. P. E. slogans is: 'Each one, teach one: let us learn together.' As a teacher, what has the C. P. E. experience taught you?
ADAMS: Mrs. Liverpool taught me many things. She taught me about things that happened long ago - the Second World War for example. She told me about the submarines and warships she saw, because she was in Trinidad then and the warships came there. Then she taught me about the problems of scarcity of food during the war, although things were cheaper. And she told me all about Hurricane Janet and the people's suffering.
And she told me about Gairy, and how she was pleased at first when he came to power because there were pay increases, but then how he got more wicked and wicked, and how at night his men would come and steal her animals. Then she told me how she had to leave school in standard three, and about the cheap prices she used to get in the colonial time when she sold her cotton which she used to grow. And she told me all about the shopping system in those days.
But the C. P. E. taught me about age. Between I and her. It taught me that this doesn't result in disaster. Between I and you, for example, the age difference might make us feel that we mustn't meet and talk with one another or be friends. She taught me that age difference doesn't matter.
THE NATIONAL IN-SERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAMME
October 30th, a new era began
For teachers and pupils of this land,
The in-service training of which I speak
To improve our teaching skills and technique.
On every Thursday of every week
Teachers will assemble to do their work,
Studying Language, Mathematics and Education
All working to increase production.
In the schools, pupils will be taught
Agriculture, Sports and Handicraft,
Community workers all join hands
To help educate the children of the land.
Forward to you thousand teachers
Who hurriedly adhered to this national call,
It's teach-partners, trainees, tutors
All co-operate in this massive ball.
Catherine Lewis (Trainee teacher)
One aspect of Grenada's inheritance from colonialism and Gairyism is the reality that two thirds, (some 600), of the nation's primary school teachers are completely untrained. This had resulted in correspondingly low academic and pedagogical standards in the primary schools. So any improvement clearly called for the priority of a teacher training programme which would speedily set about remedying this problem.
The existing Grenada Teachers' College graduated only fifty teachers a year, and this fact, together with a high rate of qualified teachers leaving the profession in Grenada for emigration, marriage or other better-paid employment, meant that an in-service model of training would achieve the quickest and most valuable results. For in such a system, study for one day a week would be permanently integrated with practice for the other four, and the teachers would be learning the job actually on the job.
In addition, such a programme could truly involve Grenada's young teachers in the tasks of building a new curriculum, something vital for a young nation trying to set its people free from the complexes and mimicry which were so profoundly a part of the colonial experience. For despite Gairy's pretensions to political independence for Grenada, the textbooks in the schools still loudly proclaimed colonial and metropolitan loyalties. Here, some trainee teachers speak about their own school learning experiences of the sixties and seventies, and the knowledge and materials which formed their base:
"Singing consisted mainly of old English, Scottish and Irish ballads: 'The Ash Grove', 'Loch Lomond', 'Annie Laurie' and 'Bobby Shaftoe'. If we were overheard singing calypsoes we were ordered to go and wash out our mouths because those were 'devil songs'.
Much of the information passed onto us from our teachers dealt mainly with what happened in England. The books we read from were the 'Royal Readers'. The poems we learned came from them. In our Arithmetic we were taught pounds, shillings and pence when in actuality the currency we were spending was in dollars and cents! The History we did, apart from Columbus and his voyages, was about English adventurers, Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh, Morgan the pirate. We were told nothing about the negroes - ourselves. And so we lived in ignorance of who we were and how we came to be where we were.
Nursery rhymes were very fashionable and we got the best of them. Rhymes like 'Little Boy Blue', 'Simple Simon', 'Goosey Goosey Gander' and 'Peter the Pumpkin Eater'. All the school readers came from Britain and therefore we had to say English poems like:
Head the ship for England
Shake out every sail,
Blithe leap the billow,
Merry sings the gale.
1960's pupils have read of Percy the Chick talking, a rabbit laughing until its mouth split and primitive Bombo in the African jungle. These, together with rhymes like 'Cow jump over the moon', might have been used as ways of improving the child's imaginative powers, but they served to alienate the world at home from the world at school, intensifying the children's frustration.
We were seeing men dressed in jacket and tie regardless of what they were doing and who they were. We were accustomed to seeing men in jacket and tie only when they were going to church or on some official business.
If one was just to glance through 'Caribbean Reader', Book Five, he would say beyond a doubt: 'Here is a book for English children, or for Europeans at least.' Looking through the book, the first picture to be encountered is one depicting 'President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill meeting at Placenta Bay, 1941'. On page eight one sees a photo of the U.S.A. cruiser 'Augusta' and a U.S, destroyer in Placenta Bay. The list could go on and on and there would still be no scenes of the Caribbean. This is as if the writers were concerned with upholding English and American values and systematically bringing them in as the pupils became more mature. These values are concerned with instilling in the children the supremacy of England and America, and loyalty towards the them."
One trainee aptly summed up the results of such a battery of mystification and alienated learning: 'We didn't really see things as they are, they appeared dark in our minds. We didn't really understand what we were speaking about.' This was the shroud of darkness that British Colonialism spun around the minds of its subject peoples, and which was handed down, like a mantle, to Eric Gairy and his counterparts.
Another part of the democratisation of the teacher training process in Grenada is the forming of 'teacher partners'. These are the minority of already-trained teachers in the schools, each of whom is assigned at least one teacher trainee. The teacher partners encourage, counsel and assess the progress of their untrained colleagues in their schools, and liaise directly with the course tutors who act as overall supervisers. Thus all teachers in Grenada, trained or untrained, are involved in the teacher training programme and thus all contribute to the development of the new curriculum. It is this mass participation that makes Grenadian teachers feel that teacher training is not the province of an academic elite who proclaim to them how to teach 'properly'. This in-service system ensures that dynamic and successful pedagogic ideas are actually passed on in the place where those ideas must be put into practice: the classroom.
The one day a week in which the trainee teachers are out of the schools is not viewed as problematic. Instead, it has been seized upon as an opportunity to break down the barriers which existed in the colonial days between the school and the community. For on this day, called the 'Community - School Day', another programme has been developed which is fast setting free the schools to receive and integrate a new kind of learning experience. Parents, workers, farmers, 'resource people' like musicians and craftsmen, and representatives of the Ministries of Health, Public Works, Agriculture and Fisheries come into the schools to give special classes and teach particular skills which until now have been considered 'outside' of the school curriculum. Classes are being held in various forms of agricultural production - particularly those which centre around Grenada's main exports: cocoa, bananas and nutmeg. There is tuition in Sanitary and Health Education, fishing techniques, as well as classes in the patois dialect, 'Big Drum' dancing and other expressions of popular culture. School students are using this day to renovate and decorate their schools, mend school furniture, clear blocked drains and culverts in their neighbourhoods, start agricultural plots, visit agro-industrial plants and learn practical fishing off the beaches.
As a result of the 'Community - School Day', the in-service programme is reaching not only all the teachers, but is sending its ripples right through the entire country and contributing to the transformation of education and life in every village where a school exists. The opportunities for initiative, energy and democratic participation are immense. Any potentially valuable pursuit or skill now need not become lost or esoteric, but can be garnered by the school for the benefit of the community. Thus the school ceases to be a bastion of alienated knowledge, but a storehouse and work- shop of the people's strengths and achievements - as well as a synamiser of their cultural potential.
N. I. S. T. E. P. is unique in the Caribbean and in the English-speaking world, and is showing a bold new direction for teacher training, always a problematic area. It has wakened a new determination among many Grenadian teachers, young and old. As one young woman trainee wrote:
"On March 13th, 1979, I, a teacher, was on my way to school, only to learn that my beloved country, Grenada, had finally seen the golden dawn of a new day. There was a lot to be done and the job was tough. It meant a lot of sacrifice and patriotic love. I was called to participate in the liquidation once and for all of illiteracy in my country. Hundreds of my colleagues were called upon to do the same.
What was I going to do? Pack my bags, book and pen and quit? Or could I try? Could I try to help the innocent yet powerful infants who crowd around me, struggling to learn what is this and what is that, asking for me, seeking for me, waiting to release their creative minds through only the flick of my finger?
And what about my grey grandmother who is always talking about her son in England? 'Me son educated, you hear? So much books and pens!' Can't I for once in her seventy nine years sit her in front of a sheet of foolscap paper, give her a pencil and lead her on and on? What can I do for my country, what can I do for my children, what can I do for my elders?
I'll try my best while I'm still alive. I'll try."
CATHERINE GEORGE
Chris Searle
Notes
[1] From The Free West Indian, 28.2.81.
[2] From speech made at The National Education Conference: 2.7.79.
[3] Ditto.
[4] Ditto.
[5] Ditto.
[6] From Broadcast on Radio Free Grenada: 17.8.80.
[7] From speech at Sauteurs, July 1979.