THEODORE LEWIS
SCHOOLING HERE is an extension of party politics. As a result, black children attend the worse schools. They are excluded from the best schools. For example, when Samsung offered the People's Partnership the opportunity to convert two secondary schools into model technology-driven schools, then prime minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar chose Lakshmi Hindu high school, and Iere Presbyterian, her alma mater, as the models.
No government schools. Just UNC-affiliated schools.
This was the prime minister of all the children, but she had a preference. She boasted about this on the passing of Sat Maharaj.
That episode is a metaphor underlying how schools are perceived in the country. They constitute political turf. But black children suffer because they do not have political champions.
The dynamic we have here in education is not seen in Jamaica, where very many schools do well, and black students could get into Mona to do medicine and engineering.
Here, black children are on the outside of the system that leads to university education. It is a kind of apartheid. They cannot get into first-choice schools that have science and add-maths. Prof Verene Shepherd of Mona writes that Jamaica once agreed to separate school systems, as early waves of indentures settled there. But soon it was realised that one state, two school systems was not going to work.
But we have that here.
Black failure is accepted as routine in this country and maybe the result even of congenital abnormality. They dunce, or their parents should be more circumspect.
On a radio programme last year in which I was a participant, Brinsley Samaroo asked me if I did not think that black children suffer from 'post-slavery syndrome.' I had never heard so much stupidness.
The education deck is stacked against black children. You have schools standing in the middle of the east-west corridor, PNM territory, but black children are locked out. Like if this is Alabama, or Pretoria, in the old days.
The Academic Performance Index (API) study of 2016 found only one excelling state-funded primary school in Port of Spain and environs, and 19 failing schools.
One of these failing schools is Nelson Street Boys RC. That is where Prof Courtenay Bartholomew went to school. The great man.
Our system of shunting children to schools based on an exam and race is unconstitutional, and stone age. It is cruel. My granddaughter not going through that.
Two children on the same street competing for access to a school.
Very many Indian working-class children suffer because of the SEA. The prestige schools turn away the children of the Indian brother with the stall in the market. His children go to comprehensive schools. He is not a Brahmin.
The Laws of Trinidad and Tobago state that 'education is guaranteed' at any age between five and 16 years and accordingly a person will be deemed to be of compulsory school age if he has attained the age of f
