Liberating Hope from SEA selection

This article is a response to but one aspect of Ms. Robyn Gillezeau’s commentary published in the online version of the Guardian on Friday January 2nd 2009 in which she opens the Pandora’s box of the 20% selection in the SEA with the concept of beneficence. I want to see what comes out. In the opening to a poem, Majestic on its Verdant Hill, about one of my alma maters, I placed the following question to a fictional form one student, “Yuh think you choose Pres. or Pres. choose you?” The answer in some sense has always been both and neither. In Trinidad and Tobago at present, and for close to half a century, some students choose their secondary schools while others are chosen by their schools, however this selection/non-selection is symptomatic of a much larger, deeply rooted ideology, indeed pathology, of our educational system and social imagination.

Let me be clear and direct. In my opinion selecting the 20% is neither arbitrary nor benign and where this selection is concerned, both charity and injustice begin at home. From an insider’s perspective I write about what I saw and remember about how the 20% was chosen having accompanied school officials to the Ministry to perform this exercise. I saw students relegated to begin at their third choice school because they didn’t make the 80% cut-off for their first choice school. Such students had already been by-passed in that school’s 20% intake and had the ‘impudence’ to place our school as their second choice. Such impudence was met with bypassing, a glancing further down the list for others with less marks who desired us and so merited more consideration. I also saw students with good grades from rural primary schools whose names were not on ‘the Principal’s list’ of elect, bypassed with the sleight-of- reasoning that perhaps it might be better that they go to school closer to where they lived. I remember one instance of a discussion about a student who, should he be on the 20% list would be selected in the hope that his father, a former national cricketer might assist the College team. Quid pro quo? Alas, I do not know.

I have also seen instances where it works as Robyn suggests – when the logic of beneficence rationalizes the selection of individuals with siblings already attending the same school, or the children of staff members, or some other truly exceptional circumstance. However in the years that I participated in this practice, these were never more than 3 or 4 students. Indeed, I would argue that Principals probably could annually make a successful case, a written submission, for the inclusion of about 5-6 students in such exceptional circumstances, 5% as opposed to 20%. This would be more transparent and lend some accountability, making the process appear to be, if not actually be, more just. The logic of beneficence, however, contradicts Robyn’s argument regarding parental choice and student fit since it problematically assumes that all siblings would necessarily ‘fit’ as well within the same institution.

I am very much against the practice of legacy preferences, a form of nepotism, in the public and private spheres, especially where public funds and public goods are involved, as is the case with education and which Robyn suggests “leaves precious few places for any new benefactors.” Such closed and exclusive systems for the movement and transfer of power and privilege worry me greatly. In any one year, for those denominational schools which have been around for a while, there are always vastly more individuals seeking backdoor admission than there are places. Which legacy child is to be chosen and how the benefactors are ranked ought to concern not only alumni but all of us. One of my especial concerns, as a former teacher, is the phenomenon of the culture of entitlement that seems to be associated with that of legacy children. Indeed I’ve heard of cases where students have declared that they would be attending a particular prestigious secondary school long before marking would have been completed.

To be fair however I must also critique the systems of fiscal management at the level of the board or school Principal and the Ministry of Education that might necessitate denominational schools turning to the benefits of legacy admissions to make ends meet or achieve their strategic goals. In this regard perhaps the Ministry needs to be more timely in its release of sufficient funds to schools and in demanding accountability and answerability on how these monies are used. In addition, the denominational schools must become more judicious about how the funds that they do receive are spent, especially in the present climate of belt-tightening. I note with sadness the financial difficulty of another alma mater, the TML school, and that of the other privileged institutions at elementary, secondary and tertiary levels in Trinidad & Tobago, the Caribbean and abroad who engage in hypercompetitive one-upmanship educational arms-races. As any mathematician, philosopher, biologist, economist or social scientist will point out all arms races are materially expensive, unsustainable and end in failure, poverty and misery for a majority. The academic arms-race that has characterized education in Trinidad and Tobago post-Independence, of which the SEA and associated practices are a part, but which has intensified in the last two decades in the form of unnecessary extra-lessons, purchased exam papers and other forms of cheating and intellectual dishonesty must end. How it will end remains to be seen, though the current trajectory is not hopeful.

Since leaving teaching at the secondary level I have reflected often about those 20 odd names from each year belonging to real 11 and 12 year old boys and girls who didn’t get chosen on the 20% but whose marks in a truly meritocratic system would entitle them by right to a place in the school of their choosing. I wonder where they are and what they are doing now? No one has spoken for those disenfranchised in the process and it disappoints me greatly to read Robyn’s commentary, another graduate and disciple of a privileged but unjust institutional framework, seeking to maintain the oppressive status quo. Imagine instead of an academic competition an international beauty or sporting competition say (or an election), in which after a top-ten were ranked based on performance alone, 20%, a mere 2 representatives, were replaced with others based on their relationships or familiarity with the sponsors, judges or other powerful and dominant interests or their country’s previous history in the competition. In order to make it more real, imagine that one of those replaced was a relatively small, perhaps little known island competitor. We would rightly be outraged. We would not accept it and we would be vocal in our denouncement of the injustice. Yet we work so hard at maintaining our current system of institutionalized disenfranchisement that does just this annually to hundreds of our children – sons, daughters, brothers and sisters. Why is this?

On the other hand, imagine that you were one of those ‘lucky’ enough to have been selected, either in the original ten or as a result of the system of unjust replacement. It would not be in your interest to speak out or against the system or institution (or its leaders), no matter how oppressive to others, from which your benefits and privileges, or those of your associates or desired associates, are derived, especially if you were still deriving benefits, desired to derive benefits for yourself in the future, or if you knew that someone coming after you, might require access to those benefits and privileges. Such a system would set up a scenario of inter-generational public silences around the issue. This code of silence would be strictly enforced. It would take an extraordinarily ‘foolish’ person to speak against such a system.

This discussion of injustice and disenfranchisement depends critically however on the knowledge that one has been or is being disenfranchised or is oneself responsible or complicit in the disenfranchisement of others. Where and from whom is this knowledge to come? Students (or their guardians) who are disenfranchised do not generally know what goes on outside the writing of the examination and the announcement of the results and in those cases where they knowingly benefit they do not consciously or publicly announce this fact. Principals, board members and staff members of denominational schools who do the choosing have no obligations at present to account or be answerable to the publics they proclaim to serve nor to the Ministry of Education on those they have selected/not selected and why. Indeed, unless you’ve sat in that bright cold fluorescent air-conditioned backroom in the Ministry of Education and held the continuous ream of computer paper, pencil, and boys and girls’ hopes and futures in your hands, one cannot really know how the 20% is chosen beyond the anecdotes and guarded whispers we share and hear. While under no obligation to account for their choices publicly, neither, to my knowledge, are those who know prevented from doing so by any legal mechanism such as a non-disclosure agreement. Indeed, what has perpetuated this unnatural silence, around what is sure to be an inflammatory issue, are the vested interests and the interest of maintaining those interests of the parties in the know and partly our own desires not to know too much about from whence our benefits our own and others’ oppressions derive. Continued silence however in this context renews our unholy covenant and complicity with a socially unjust regime.

Though I am not always on the same page, I endorse Pope Benedict XVI, and a myriad of others who have called for the overhaul and creation of more just alternatives to any and all unjust economic and social structures. In his message for the World Day of Peace he says, “sooner or later, the distortions produced by unjust systems have to be paid for by everyone." It is already later and we have already paid dearly for the distorted logics we have built our educational systems upon. We have already been given “permission to mash up d place” – to begin the process of deconstructing, decolonising and as necessary dis-mantling those aspects of our unjust institutions, our douendoms, that de-humanise and hide our fully human identities – as a prelude to remaking something better, for all of us, every creed and race, together. The current debate around the practice of school selection which took off in early December last year and the earlier public outrage at the Culture Ministry’s lack of transparency in its award of scholarships are healthy signs of a maturing public dialogue. However, it will be our continued individual and collective willingness and courage to open the other Pandora’s boxes in our midst and confront what lies therein that will determine how long our Hope must yet slumber.