Are We Proudly Celebrating 'Education Month' In Barbados?
The following was published in the Barbadian Newspaper, "Barbados Today" as a guest column during October 2015. October is celebrated as Education Month on the island. However, for the first time in history, Barbadian university students has been asked to pay tuition fee. A move that is contrary to its traditional socialist ideals, its overall commitment to development through education, and one that shows it continual degeneration into neoliberalism. Because I subsribe to the view of education as a fundamental human right, I have been specifically agitating, and will continuing to agitate against this change in policy until the policy is reversed.
This month being Education Month, at many levels within the educational system, there are celebrations. However, I think it my duty to remind this country that university education has ceased to be an option for many Barbadians.
Some three quarters of the students who were studying at the Cavehill campus has had to abandon their studies due to the inability to afford the new costs. Additionally, Barbadian applicants for university study at Cavehill are now at an all time low. A cursory glance around the campus reveals a new face, one that is largely not Barbadian. Whilst we welcome our foreign comrades both international and regional, the lack of Barbadian students has wider reaching implications for the state.
One of the main concerns is future developmental planning. The majority of the current Barbadian students at University are the types that are more likely to seek opportunities abroad in cosmopolitan countries, or in family businesses and so on.
Will Barbados in the near future lower the educational, and expertise requirements for those who will head critical institutions, and those who will staff them in the general manner? Or will the country simple be satisfied to have only a minute pool from which to choose?
It was just over a decade or so that many who held positions based on experience alone, had to be retrained or were replaced with university-educated persons. Will that process be proven to be unnecessary if the country is likely to return from whence it came? Or perhaps the Government will be satisfied to hire from abroad, which in the fundamental sense is not an issue.
It is an issue however, if Barbados is unable to export comparable numbers of educated persons. Barbados, just like many other Caribbean islands depends on millions of dollars in remittances to enhance its economy. Thus, whilst many are critical of the fact that many are freely educated and eventually take up opportunities abroad, this is an industry that has been viable to the development of this nation.
Barbadian graduates can commandeer greater salaries in full-time positions requiring a university degree, than as a seasonal general worker on an exchange programme picking fruits. Higher education is therefore more likely to result in greater remittances.
Then there is the question of governance in a mature democracy. To the progressive minded, the current system has many inadequacies. Even in an environment with free university education, a large segment of the populace does not have sufficient understanding of governance or democracy, to enable them to grasp that their involvement should extend beyond a vote every four years, or unquestioning support of a political party. A larger population of persons therefore, with limited education can only further exacerbate the failures of the post-colonial Barbadian state, unless some other medium takes the place of formal education.
The inherent argument here is not that persons without a university education are incapable of understanding democracy and development, nor is it that everyone with a university education does for that matter. The argument is that Barbados will in the future require more persons with university level training and expertise to be able to help implement and develop new ideas in this neoliberal time and space, and to represent the nation at the international level. Those persons cannot all be persons who are out of touch with the realities of what it means to be working class or middle class; since at no fault to them, their privileged positions cannot afford them the wherewithal to represent the general interest, no matter how genuine their intentions. The system therefore requires persons from all backgrounds in positions at the highest levels; it is the age-old question of true representation.
From the time of Barbados’ birth as an independent nation university educated persons helped to guide the ideological framework that was to shape the socio-political and socio-economic realities. It has been these same types of personalities that predominantly continued to build on the work that was started by our forefathers.
Unfortunately, it is these same types that of recent have limited access to university education to aspiring persons from lower and middle class socio economic backgrounds. This change in policy can best be described as a reversal of the correction of a historical wrong, and represents an ideological failure at the highest level, where it matters most. With the current focus on reparations, it should be noted that for persons who have been displaced, disempowered, and dispossessed, these actions reflect that segments of Barbadian society would rather destroy the progress made, which in itself remains limited, than to continue to make further gains.
This brings into question the level of importance on the issue of reparations to those at the leadership of the state. There is a shared ideological position between the concept of free university education and the idea of reparations. Since, providing education free of cost to individuals, helps to repair historical dispossession, and empowers the segments of society better placed to critically address issues of people of similar background. The practice throughout the history of Barbados has been for persons to rise to prominence through their access to education, and as a result created change at the levels of policy making, aimed at constructing processes for easier access by those coming after.
Research has shown the links between education, and socio-economic societal ills such as crime and poverty. These are issues that are currently affecting the nation at a seemingly higher rate, although I hesitate to state the causes without empirical analysis. A cursory glance would suggest that it fits neatly with the higher levels of desperation and hopelessness, resulting from fewer opportunities for youth, coupled with the higher cost of living.
Barbadian leaders should recognize, that apart from those persons who had to withdraw from Cavehill, many others who were aiming to attend would now have to abandon or postpone such dreams. To boot, many in the generations to follow seeing the hardships in their households, and by extension their communities, may not even consider higher education as optional given their space in time. The age-old insult of 'work harder' is not enough to change these realities, since no one within any society works as hard as its poor.
Thus, for Education Month, Barbadians should focus on educators, and success stories, and that one person who made it against the odds, and the physical development of educational institutions; but they must also reflect on this new access to education policy from the point of view of what it means for the modern Barbadian state.
Barbadians must demand of the leadership an answer to the question of options, instead of uncritically accepting the position that, ‘there is no alternative’. There are many issues within a society on which there will be, and should be differing opinions. But the question of free access to education at all levels is not an issue on which there should be widespread disagreement - not if there is genuine interest in continuing to build Barbados.
One may disagree with methodology, or with what that education should entail, or on the implementation of changes to aid the current challenges. But the fundamental action of educating citizens of one of the smallest of Small Island Developing Nations, with its history of slavery, colonization and imperialism, a country that has used education to ‘punch above its weight’ in the absence of other viable resources; should see its leaders in agreement that free access to university education transcends narrow economic arguments, and that it remains in the collective best interest of Barbados.
-Ayo Ololara is the Chairperson – Access to Education Committee of the Barbados National Council of the United Nations Decade of African Peoples-
