British colonialism unjustly blamed blamedx

Dawn Ritch

FELLOW COLUMNIST Peter Espeut in his August 8 column said that British colonialism neglected education in Jamaica by making little effort to establish more high schools in the island. He seems troubled by the many Jamaicans who think we should have remained a colony. It was French colonialism which contributed public libraries, but when an empire gives a civil service and British common-law to its colonies, these are hardly matters to sneer at.

Where I think things started to go wrong was in the 20th century, when people began to think of education as a divine right, like sobriety. Nothing could be further from the truth. Some people's heads just can't take education, a fact widely admitted to in the 19th century. Therefore families made a conscious decision about which children should be given the benefit of those financial resources. Once education came publicly-funded, instead of by private donation and church, the seats in the schoolroom vastly expanded and the quality of education shrank. By that time no one could be blamed for thinking it should be free.

That unhappy experience of education in the last century was doubly compounded by America, which decided by the middle of it that education ought also to be purely technical. The study of Latin and Greek was abandoned except by pipe-smoking, elderly professorial types. Most people consequently forgot how to pronounce everyday words, because knowledge of their root was now lost in a new dark ages. Never mind that technology with commercial application was primarily invented in Britain, France and Germany in that order, it was America which made the money out of it. This was a result of America's having financed two world wars in Europe as well as fighting in them on the side of the Western Allies, and Britain subsequently repaying much of its war debts to the USA at great cost to itself.

During the first half of the 20th century, a climate of anti-colonialism was assiduously fostered worldwide by America, which has always been envious of empire, and the propaganda made colonies avid for political independence and so-called freedom. Britain was having a difficult financial time having led both fights against German aggression, and acquiesced except in the case of the smallest territories, capable of efficient micro-management. Nobody can quarrel with the job they continue to do in the latter territories, having recently handed over the island of Hong Kong to China in mint condition.

The French have left a cultural legacy of frivolity whether in art, fashion or forms of government. It is no accident therefore that they were the only colonial power to have a policy of public libraries in their colonies, which no doubt, contributed to the early fractiousness of their subject populations. Small wonder then that Wretched of the Earth was written by Franz Fanon, a product of French colonialism. Even today the French provide a vital counterpoint in international diplomacy. Always the first to feel sympathy for the downtrodden Third World, even though their actual administration of colonies left a great deal to be desired, the French have been great theoreticians in all matters.

Britain was the nation of shop-keepers and practical to the bone. Children were used for chimney sweeps and government should rest in the hands of those bred to the task. They took the sensible view that there will always be the very rich and the very poor, and what mattered most was discipline and a stiff upper lip. Hence a British worldwide constabulary where Indian Sikhs were sent to Trinidad, West Indians sent elsewhere, and all the techniques learned from long-term management of Ireland which for centuries has not wanted to be managed by them, employed in the task.

The British brought to colonialism therefore, a sense of public administration as craft, and a balance in the public accounts which they tried in vain to impart to their former colonies whether India or Jamaica. And with that a system of consequences which were neither arbitrary nor unpredictable, known as British common law.

That the colonies chose to be undisciplined is I think, a matter only for them. First they set about corrupting the civil service, and then the judiciary whenever they could. Of course they built schools, but they couldn't even be bothered to keep the colonial aqueducts free of weeds so that their towns could have water. And of course here in Jamaica the reservoirs were allowed to silt up. The British can hardly be blamed for this. All over the world they built railroads which they didn't tear out when they left. We just let the railway rot.

Out of our expanded high schools we routinely turn out functional illiterates so that, everybody can spend a fortune on graduation clothes. Now new hope is being offered in the form of computers. Yet well over half of American university graduates employed in that country can't spell, nor write a two-paragraph business letter. Britain has much the same problem because she followed America's lead. Indeed Britain is charged by its own citizens for dumbing-down its education and culture. Even its admission standards to university are in doubt, again following America's lead. Still people, even Americans, fight for places at Oxford and Cambridge, so all cannot be lost I suppose.

Education can and should be elitist, and only the disciplined should dare hope to sit in a classroom. A school is not a creche for the children of society. That is the job of each family. Having placed no value on discipline however, the family cannot be expected to value education, and does not. All Jamaica's schools since Independence have achieved is to add another passing-out parade to the social calendar in a country whose citizens are fondest of funerals. It used to be that the only responsibility that a Jamaican parent rarely neglected to his or her children was to pay for high school and through scholarship hope perhaps for a university education. Now we routinely put our children on the streets to hustle, or send them to school to terrorise the teachers and the local police station. That can hardly be the fault of British colonialism. It is instead merely the lowest common denominator of egalitarianism.

Freedom was sold as freedom from authority, never as economic freedom. The idea of wages was never sold either, except as the 'wages of sin'. And finally when Jamaica got its Independence, all it meant was that nobody addressed anybody as "Sir" or "Maam" any longer, and it became a whole heap of unprintable things. Leading inevitably to gunfire. When I think of how often British colonialism has been blamed for our condition in Jamaica, it seems a terrible injustice.

Because they at least were responsible, and openly so in their time. Who wouldn't wish for a return to the sanity of colonialism, if not the honesty of slavery in the midst of abject indiscipline, waste and lawlessness.

FOOTNOTE: I apologise for an error in saying in my August 12 column that one of the investors in the failed sugar company was the McConnell family. The investor was J.Wray & Nephew.

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