Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor
THE CHILDREN at Mount Nebo Primary School in Northern St. Catherine and those at Grove Town Primary in Southern Manchester are among the brightest that I have encountered in recent times. (Of course, yu dun know, I think our children are all simply wonderful until they encounter some of us). We probably will not recognise them later on in the education system. Maybe they get sent to schools that are graded D for demeaning criteria for measuring their competencies. Maybe they get graded B for battered into a lack of confidence in the skills and abilities they posses which few seem to count or know how to put to productive use. Maybe they get an F for failure to live up to the one size fits all inability or unwillingness of the system to define the kind of human being who is an educated person beyond the number of subjects and corresponding grades on a piece of paper.
Yes, if that were to be the sole judge of Jamaican children we would conclude on the worthlessness of vast numbers of actual and potential productive citizens. For surely, the way the matter of our children's performance, or lack of it is discussed, this could not be our collective responsibility or collective failure. Moreover, duncey head pickney in duncey head schools provide research material for the powerful and fortunate, form the basis of lamentations for people who delight in wringing their hands at what we have become, speeches of the I-told-you-so variety for persons skilled at the art of quietly predicting doom and destruction, lifting not one finger to stop it but jumping jubilantly and yelling the sky is falling, like some modern day Chicken Little.
DUNCEY HEAD PICKNEY
Duncey head pickney in duncey head schools become the platform from which politicians campaign, the theme of cocktail party conversation for the Pharisees who thank God that they are not like other men. In fact they might not be mortal men at all. They who sit with answer sheets in hand and curse at the inability of those they have taught to maintain the answers to this or that exams in their heads. Better yet they stock their libraries with books containing the very answers and keep them within easy reach just in case they are ever needed for reference. Well, maybe if we were to judge our competencies by our ability to know answers by heart we would conclude on our collective worthlessness.
Isn't it time we wrote a different story? One in which the gate was made secure before the horse discovered that he could bolt? Maybe we are not so bright outside of the security of this or that piece of paper with the official seal.
All over Jamaica, our children try and accomplish much that, just like their parents and grandparents on whose blood, sweat and tears this nation continues to thrive, CXC's just would not know how to grade. Maybe the horse continues to bolt because no one ever celebrated that. So why try? Maybe the whole notion of accomplishment needs to be redefined.
Take the children at Mount Nebo and Grove Town schools. They recently mounted the most unique and innovative celebrations of Jamaica Day, which originated in the Division of Culture. At Mount Nebo the community of parents, teachers and students prepared an exhibition of agricultural crops which demonstrated each of the crops chosen from planting stage to end product, including the variety of ways in which each one could be prepared, preserved and marketed. The rest of the day consisted of a range of activities moving from the modern day bounce-about, operated by the principal himself, a concert of Jamaican poems, songs and traditional dances, a Jamaican kitchen featuring everything jerked and an afternoon dance party with the local disco at which each child paid $20 to enter the schoolroom transformed into a dancehall, and $10 for every dance competition they wished to enter in order to raise funds for their school.
RELEVANCE OF CULTURE
Over at Grove Town, the school played host to a number of primary and secondary schools in the parish in a day-long festival of the skills of the participating schools in dance, music, speech and the steel-band from Christiana High School was simply awesome. Each child and parent who attended contributed $50 for the sumptuous Jamaican meal that was served at lunch time. How would these activities be graded? Maybe they wouldn't be. That's not really learning, is it? And it will never get them into the University of Anywhere. There's a topic worth researching: how many university graduates have ever come from those parts? How many famous Jamaicans? Well, there you have it.
What is the value of this Jamaica Day anyway? And, in any case, there are University graduates who haven't the faintest notion of the size of the island. Nay, they could hardly name the first two Prime Ministers or say anything worthwhile about Northern St. Catherine or Southern Manchester. Nuh country dat an ah town ah carry de swing. The University of Town has subjects with desirable grades.
Could they construct a stage from plyboard with desks as the base using the combination desks as the steps on which to climb to perform on said stage? Would they perform on such a stage? The children at Mount Nebo and Grove Town were proud of that they could and did. But out in the boondocks where there are few names to drop (and some that should be dropped) no big money since yam don't fetch dat, few fancy cars and degrees hanging on walls, the determinants of who you are in Town, no one knows their names. Or rates their mannerliness or their warm, loving and caring personalities.
MATERIAL TRAPPINGS
In the void in which these qualities are ignored or underrated, men get plenty of attention by making duppies and shooting corpses, so that men may study or lament how men came to this. Mobs of the brightest and the best of us, with subjects and high positions hunt thieves with machetes and sticks to enhance our reputation as a nation of murderers who kill thieves to prove that we are better than them. And the bid to be "better than" takes us to some very strange places with baffling names like drug pushers, area dons, mules and all the other labels with which we hunt the material trappings in this culture that worships at the shrine of the material, the more costly the better, and frustrate and backbench those not similarly trapped.
Maybe the communities of Mount Nebo and Grove Town want us to pay attention to a different set of details. Like how we use our available resources to excite our children to manifest their uniqueness; to be proud of who they are and what they produce; to recognise the value of every skill and every accomplishment - to celebrate God and the big right hand and whatever other talents he has given each and every one for our collective well being.
But we too love hindsight, nearly as much as we seem to relish in the manifestations of our worst predictions. It is so much easier than finding the courage to sit down together and write an agenda which does not require us to do anything but affirm, like the Cuban poet, that to be, simply to be, in this time and this latitude is a very significant victory.
