Orville Taylor | Two surveys: many problems

Mathematics used to terrify me. My sympathetic teacher once told the class that my frequent errors were alright; because it’s by making mistakes that one learns. A cruel classmate set the room ablaze with laughter when he remarked that, if that’s so, I ought to be a math genius by then. Actually, it is quite funny but wasn’t amusing to a 14-year-old kid, who learned more arithmetic in Spanish and scripture class than in mathematics. So, it would be surprising to my classmates from high school that I like numerical data so much.

Several surveys and reports over the past few weeks have given us much food for thought. The first is that of a team from Northern Caribbean University (NCU) led by Paul Bourne, its acting director of institutional research. Number two, of course, is that of the reputable Don Anderson. On the tail end of an earlier report that showed that more than 70 per cent of Jamaicans believed that the reintroduction of the death penalty would create a deterrence, and thus lead to a reduction in crime, ostensibly homicides, a higher number in the following report was opposed to decriminalising buggery.

As important as that would be to some of my colleagues, this debate will have to be placed on the back burner for now, because there is a crisis in the core segment which reproduces the next generation; not just the sexual minorities. Far more important is the fact that as most of us in the behavioural sciences warned, the socio-psychological impact of COVID-19 is now being felt, because the adjustments during the pandemic were inimical to social relations and could end up destroying many households.

Far from the myths about female-headed families and marginality, the reality is that close to ten per cent of households are simply women living by themselves. As my esteemed friend and colleague Professor Errol Miller warned 30 years ago, men were at risk. With more than 30 per cent of Jamaican university and teachers’ colleges places being occupied by females, it was already clear that they would become more empowered in status and finance faster than their male counterparts.

VEHICLE FOR UPWARD MOBILITY

Education is doubtless the best vehicle for upward mobility, and it takes many a family out of the grasps of poverty, although the current situation regarding the conditions of teachers might seem antithetical to this premise. In small and intimate spaces, status change can be a major problem. People with expanded minds and new perspectives sometimes have to make special efforts to leave the external outside. Thus, the newly minted PhD with his discipline-specific jargon must understand that his less knowledgeable friends, with whom he used to cook chicken back and eat butter crackers, are not his inferiors, even if they might hype him and call him ‘Doc’.

Doubtless, some ‘get rich and switch’. They either do this by simply cutting ties or by going out to work, or other places of secondary socialisation, where they associate with their new ‘peers’. With the pandemic this avenue and vent was closed. Against the background of a 2021 Inter-American Development Bank study that revealed a 10.3 per cent increase in Jamaican domestic violence since COVID-19, Bourne’s team’s research noted that in rural areas, educated women were overrepresented as victims. Some 53.7 of women, abused both physically and emotionally by their partners, are in that 70 per cent of students who went on to matriculate past high school.

There is nothing counter-intuitive about the data from the NCU team. It makes perfect sense. Doubtless, we might choose to use sociological and psychological theories to explain this. However, on the ground, the reality is that even without the COVID-19 social distancing and confinement, the upward mobility of a partner can create tensions. Given our cultural norms on men being ‘ministers of minding’, it is much more difficult for males to depend on others, including their teachers, to help them out while studying. In fact, among the just under 10 per cent of women living in single-person households, or the 18 per cent female-headed homes with no residential male, no less than half of those have male partners, who give some support.

True, our socialisation as men unfortunately makes us feel that the marriage licence or the common law contract is a title of ownership, as with a car or house. However, at best, a relationship between a person who supports another to become upwardly mobile is at best one of usufruct. A human cannot own another. Slavery was abolished in 1838.

As my other former student and colleague Georgia Rose from the University of the West Indies, Montego Bay campus, indicated last week, COVID-19 has caused and is causing myriad social pathologies.

In a society where our males have been emasculated since slavery, taught wrong skills regarding intimacy and have fragile masculinity, we have to pay special attention to how we raise our boys.

So, you see why we need experienced teachers in the classroom.

One love.

Dr Orville Taylor is head of the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.