I want to congratulate the Express for displaying courage in breaking with tradition to foreground questions that are often neglected in the outpourings of pride that we feel for the ‘winners’ and the silent pain we feel towards the ‘losers’ in the SEA competition and lottery in their
Editorial of July 2. On principle I refuse to refer to it any longer as merely an examination or assessment. However, there are several oversimplifications in their analysis, which, while necessary for an Editorial, work against the hopes expressed by the authors therein for substantial and meaningful change for the better, for more, if not for all, which need to be addressed. For example, in the first paragraph the Editor writes of the “intellectual talent and hard work” that allows the best and brightest to beat out all the rest and which we uneasily celebrate. But as a former top Common Entrance student, National, Commonwealth and now Canadian Vanier Scholar as well as a critical educator, I am cognizant of the fact that these are insufficient determinants of success. Like many of our successful students success has also been purchased for me through the cultural capital earned and provided by ancestors, extended family, recursively elaborative educational experiences and social networks of friends, peers and mentors at all stages of my development. That is to say I have been part of rich educational ecosystems, knowledge networks, which have provided me significant and ongoing developmental opportunities to learn.
It is time to end the myth of the isolated and individual genius as this stereotype misleadingly sets up an outlier phenomenon as a norm. Rather, it is clear from an abundance of research sources that individuals’ potentials unfold and develop in safe supportive networks of relationships that provide ongoing, meaningful opportunities to learn in a timely fashion. That certain groups do not appear to succeed as well as others do in this competition is not to say that members of those groups do not work as hard or are not as intelligent. Indeed, while we ought to look towards school reform, our chief concerns as individuals and as a community ought to be on the networks of economic, social, political, preferential, and intellectual relations that continue to structure our neo-colonial plantation society in increasingly unjust ways. If we want to change education we are going to have to change those networks, the systems of distribution and production and flow, and the ways we relate and function in the new networks we create. This is an argument that has been made by Lloyd Best and others and repeatedly ignored. I do not think it likely that I will fare more successfully than my predecessors. But I will try nevertheless to help us to call to mind, name, and question our currently limiting educational mythology and work towards beginning to imagine and narrate different, more hopeful ones.
Imagine for a moment the highly improbable scenario that somehow all of our teacher education, curriculum reform, infrastructural improvements, resourcing, and other professional development initiatives bore their fruits simultaneously with a result that all schools and every student performed as well as every other student on the SEA, or as the Editors put it that all schools managed to reach the same high standard. What if we actually succeeded in our stated ambitions? Can you imagine the panic that would ensue? Our ability to choose and sort students and thus to determine an identity and assign intellectual status would be compromised. What a wonderful day that would be. Unfortunately, as long as our networks, relationships and performances remain as they are, that day is unlikely to come.
Examinations are premised on variability in student achievement. The latter is correlated and co-varies with a large number of variables, not all known and not all applicable to a given individual at a given moment. These range from parental education to teacher marital status to frequency and quality of “breakfasses” and other meals to the availability of personal, quiet individual study space. When examinations were developed it was never the intent or purpose that all those examined should achieve at the same level in the same time or at the same age. The purpose of examinations is to discriminate, i.e. to make distinctions for a particular purpose such as suitability for military service or identifying and diagnosing specific deficiencies. Indeed, the continued existence of SEA inhibits our ability to ever achieve our educational goals for all. The philosophies underlying SEA, together with the associated practice of sorting and assigning value and worth are incompatible with and antagonistic to our goals of helping all students reach their full potential as human beings. Competitive exams like SEA within social systems like our own are designed, and designed well, to create a taxonomy of human value that sorts humans into categories suitable either as products for different degrees of further processing, some for eventual export to the metropolitan capitals of the world, a phenomenon Naipaul and other Caribbean or post-colonial writers have dealt with better than I can, or to discursively construct a class of sub-humans seen as only as waste or collateral damage. Schools and examinations are extremely good at producing such failure and waste.
What would happen if every student who went into the SEA examination room wrote nothing on their papers? What was highly improbable just a moment ago becomes absolute certainty. Students and children are not so positioned as to wield such political capital, nor are they taught how to, nor should they be used as pawns to advance the agenda of others. Such a decision is a choice that they have to make for themselves. It is perhaps the most important decision they will have to make, or can make in their young lives – much more important that writing an exam that is at best loosely related to what they can do and what they might be capable of doing in the future. It is a decision to down tools, lime many of our ancestors, and say, collectively, “this is neither good nor just.” An act of collective resistance by the least powerfully positioned might just be the thing to bring to an end this repressive regime of inappropriate testing once and for all. For my alma mater, San Fernando TML, and other Schools it would mean giving up the annual public spectacle and photo-ops surrounding the SEA, important marketing for future fund-raising, and actually thinking about what might be good for the education of all not just those that I happen to teach. For the media, they would have to want to create new narratives of educational success which the Express seems to be moving towards.
The Editors are wrong when they claim that “In every education system, it will always be a minority who excel.” This inductive leap, a hyperbolic generalization is false. It is more correct to say that in every education system set up as ours has been and continues to be – to identify a few elites and mandarins – there is a very large probability, approaching certainty, that only a minority will ever be allowed to demonstrate an excellence as narrowly defined by a single measure taken early in life. As argued above and elsewhere, variability in what we call success in our system does not come from talent and effort alone. Where this variation is attached to important social goods, namely a ‘prestigious’ educational trajectory, a visit from the Prime Minister, the Minister of Education, or a front page on a newspaper, and attached to a valued social category – winner, success, bright – it can only be a minority who are allowed to excel. Drawing attention to the way our systems are set up as the source of the differential achievement and waste production however opens space for imagining that indeed they might be set up differently in ways that give rise to more hopeful emergent possibilities than the nihilistic assumption that it is only ever a minority who can excel, an ideology that flirts with biological and social determinism.
By way of counter example, consider Finland which finished first in several recent international benchmarks in science (PISA) and mathematics (TIMMS) education. Among the attributions given for this phenomenon by Finnish researchers in the book “How Finns Learn Mathematics and Science” are commitments by the government to fostering a knowledge-based-society, promoting educational equality and devolving decision making power to local school levels. These commitments are manifested in practices such as having common comprehensive schools in which all types of students learn together for as long as possible and ensuring special needs teachers and guidance counselors are available to render assistance and give advice. Significantly, schools and teachers are responsible for selecting learning materials, organizing general assessment and for using the data to evaluate how well they are meeting goals. They are given full professional responsibility for their decision-making. Theirs is not a top-down hierarchical model as National level inspections of learning materials ended in the early 1990's and there are no national or local school inspectors since “teachers are valued as experts in curriculum development, teaching and in assessment at all levels." This strong testament of professional confidence in their teaching fraternity is warranted as Finland has a rigorous programme of teacher education. [Note Finland’s success in the 90’s and first part of this century is partly due also to a fairly homogenous population and economy. With immigration and the global financial crisis this is changing.]
The Editors ask “why aren’t more primary schools reaching the highest standards?” That ‘talent’ seems to be concentrated in localized hubs of excellence is easily explained: success tends to function as an attractor basin and amplifier for future success. ‘Successful’ schools have developed and evolved so as to maintain a successful ‘fit’ within our educational landscape based on selection pressures such as SEA and contingent upon a geography and history, shaped by the forces of the colonial civilizing mission. A large part also has to do with parental choices. Take for example Cipero R.C., my mother’s former school in Rambert Village. The school is small, quiet, safe, the staff and Principal are talented and motivated and doing very good work, the community is involved and this year they had a 100% pass rate. Few if any children from the neighboring communities of Palmiste, Gulf View, or Bel Air, many Catholics included, attend or will attend school there. Instead, many parents elect to send their children to Private schools or sit in traffic in San Fernando to pick their children up from the more prestigious San Fernando Boys’ R.C. and St. Gabriel’s R.C. schools, neither of which has much open space and whose classes are much larger than at Cipero. I wonder how the small southern community might be transformed if the networks of flow of students were altered such that different decisions were made about where children were to be educated and with whom they might interact. I encourage parents to consider sending their children to schools in closer proximity to where they reside and to work to build all the schools in their communities, not merely the ones that their children attend. In this way our diverse talents and cultural capitals might be dispersed differently.
I don’t wish to get drawn into the sex and race debates at this time. However, I wish to point out that these visible markers of difference are not the only relevant variables relating to student achievement – they are however easy to attribute and record. If we were to examine other criteria that relate to successful or unsuccessful students we might find that there are other important variables which we could in fact attend to structurally and systematically, rather than continuing to re-inscribe failure and deficiency onto individually sexed and raced biological and discursively constructed bodies. Further, if the narrative of academic ‘panic’ is put in our back pocket perhaps we might understand those students who are not succeeding to be like canaries in a mineshaft, telling us that there is something terribly wrong with the environment in our schools and perhaps with the institution of School itself for them. School is not habitable, hospitable or hopeful for many of our students. Let’s SEA what happens next…
[Originally published in the Trinidad Express on
July 9th and
July 10th 2009. This is a slightly expanded version.]
