Arts, technics, education and society

Martin Henry, Contributor

We now have a new Poet Laureate. Professor Emeritus Mervyn Morris, with a strong track record in writing and performing poetry, has been selected to wear the laurel wreath of official National Poet.

Morris succeeds J.E. Clare McFarlane after a 61-year hiatus in appointments. And there has been only one other Poet Laureate, Tom Redcam, nom de plume for Thomas McDermott, after whom a road has been named in Kingston.

It was entirely fitting that the presentation of the new Poet Laureate was made at the National Library of Jamaica (NLJ), the successor of the West India Reference Library operated by the Institute of Jamaica for 100 years from 1879 to 1979 when the NLJ took over. The Institute of Jamaica was the intellectual, knowledge and cultural centre of Jamaica long before there was a university.

What is entirely curious is that it is the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment (MTE), not the ministry with responsibility for culture, which has spearheaded the appointment of the Poet Laureate. Poetry is much more than entertainment and could only very loosely be considered a tourism product. But the MTE has the Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF), from which the office of Poet Laureate can be bankrolled. The TEF is putting up J$3.4 million for the first three-year cycle of the office, which should be just about enough to pay for quills and parchment! The arts need patrons. And the general absence of patrons, be they private philanthropists or government support, is an index of our civilisation.

Professor Morris' appointment as Poet Laureate comes at Easter, a subject on which he has delivered his own soaring poetry, 'On Holy Week'. I am without Internet - joining a long line of Judaeo-Christian epic poetry like Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and stretching back to the majestic messianic prophetic poetry of the Old Testament by masters like the 8 BC Isaiah, who is easily one of the greatest poets we know in ancient literature. The great composer, Geor Fridric Händel incorporated the grand poetry of Isaiah into his Messiah, widely regarded as the greatest of the oratorios in the European classical music tradition.

We need poetry - and the arts - and for much more than entertainment.

Once again, the matter of curriculum content has come up for public discussion. Minister of Education Ronald Thwaites has announced a renewed technical and vocational focus for secondary education. The emerging national technical and vocational education and training policy will, among other things, drive the integration of technical vocational education and training into the secondary-school curriculum; and every student will be required to sit at least one tech/voc subject in the CSEC examinations.

Well, shouldn't the minister and the ministry seize the opportunity, carpe diem (grasp the day), and go the full distance with the reform of secondary education?

At base level, every child in secondary education should be given access to, and proper preparation for, the CSEC examinations. The exclusion of large numbers now from sitting is a travesty.

If children are going to be required to sit at least one tech/voc subject, which is good, what else should they be taking at the end of secondary education? The notion of a high-school diploma, indicating satisfactory minimum general achievement in secondary education, has been see-sawing for years.

A lot of effort is now being made for TVET skills certification for workforce development. My friend and former colleague, Dr Wayne Wesley, who now heads the HEART Trust/National Training Agency, made it clear at his recent election as chairman of the Caribbean Association of Training Agencies (CANTA) that a key goal of his chairmanship will be to help CANTA fulfil its mandate of providing standardised certification for skilled workers in order to facilitate their free movement within CARICOM.

It is time to make the high-school diploma mandatory certification for progression into further education and for entry into the formal professional workforce.

And what should the diploma require? The obvious English language and mathematics as the mandatory core. And then at least one representative subject each out of the arts and humanities, the sciences (natural or social), and the technical/vocational. Added to this core set of five, at least one other subject should be required from one of these groups to establish the beginnings of an area of concentration.

Asking secondary-school students to demonstrate competence in just six subject areas for certified graduation is no great or impossible demand at all. The fact that more than 90 per cent of each cohort fails to achieve this now is a serious indictment upon the system.

But long before CSEC, Jamaican children should be broadly educated for civilisation and citizenship without too great a regard for subject boundaries. And their teachers should be trained to do so. The primary curriculum, with which I have interacted for various reasons over many years, is, on paper, pretty good in this regard. The problem is in the implementation, with all the sub-issues from crowded classrooms to teacher preparation and the lack of teaching and learning materials.

Not much else is going to get better before it becomes a bold national focus to get all children fully literate (across the range of literacies) by the end of grade four, age 10. Literacy is then a gateway into the literature (broadly defined) of the children's culture (broadly defined, from world to community), a tool for producing their own creative content, and a navigational instrument for finding their way about the world.

The liberal arts have long been regarded as the civilising component of education. In the bad old days of the slave and the free, they were the arts fit for free men and which kept them free. We need literature - poetry and prose, languages, history, philosophy, religious studies. And going to the fine arts, we need painting and sculpture and craft, music and drama and dance. To see how short these arts are in the school system, one just needs to look at the CSEC registration numbers against the benchmark English language.

But we also need to learn how to do things, the practical things that run economies and provide the flow of tangible goods and services on which modern life depends. The advanced economies are very good at doing technical things and at innovating better ways of getting things done. One of the means they have used to build technical competence has been the apprenticeship system. Jamaica is resuscitating its apprenticeship system with Professor Gossett Oliver of the University of Technology (UTech), himself a fine product of the British apprenticeship system, appointed chairman of the Apprenticeship Board.

"Apprenticeship," the framework document tells us, "is a structured system of training designed to prepare individuals for skilled occupations. It combines on-the-job training under the supervision of experienced workers with related structured instruction. Apprentices who successfully complete the ... training ... become certified skilled workers."

A primary objective of the revived apprenticeship scheme is to "create a pool of competent technicians to satisfy the needs of modern industry, through a process of structured on-the-job training and certification." But the apprentices have to come with a good basic education.

In its call to "incentivise engineering, technical training", on December 22 last year, this newspaper lamented "the great emphasis on non-technical education", even at the UTech, where nearly one-third of students there were pursuing business degrees and five per cent law in a new law faculty. On the other hand, liberal-arts people around the world have been complaining bitterly about declining support for the civilising arts.

The old tensions between arts and technics in education - both necessary - need not remain without solution. Management master Peter Drucker, in defending management as a new integrative and pervasive discipline combining arts and science, suggested that if the liberal arts are to survive and flourish, they would need to become servants of practice.

As an instructor in the field myself, I am aware of one very prestigious business school which teaches critical thinking, problem solving and decision making through literature and drama. These are the very skills of mind which schoolchildren and university youth must be helped to develop through balanced exposure to the arts and sciences by teachers who are themselves masters, even as the students learn their technics for later economic engagements. Civilised citizens make better workers. But civilisation is an end in itself - and a desirable one.

Martin Henry is a university administrator and public-affairs analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.