Developed status by 2030: An illusion?

Last week I found myself doing something I dislike extremely - comparing today's youth, fielding complaints about their difference from the cohort 50 years ago. One issue: An apparent lack of perceptive grasp of our recent socio-political and economic history, more so, lack of understanding the impacts of European colonisation on the colonised.

Some older-generation complainants claim this is partly why they willingly live for today and glorify fleeting non-constructive pleasures. Has the notion of our history as irrelevant overwhelmed their consciousness? That slavery is to be forgotten, an unmentionable cop-out, an excuse and justification for non-achievement, as some would have it? Or is it that today's technological revolution - iPhone, etc — renders them subject to attention deficit disorder?

I recalled a lecture, a tribute to late Guyanese historian and revolutionary scholar Walter Rodney, a few weeks ago.

At the end of that talk, members of the audience wondered: Why is it that so many Guyanese of that generation did so well in academic and other pursuits? and further, why is it indeed that so many of that lot attended the Queens College of British Guiana?

I reflected on the influence of the early secondary schools in the region, Jamaica College, Harrison College, Queens Royal College in Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, respectively.

(Old boys and girls please pardon the short list; no ill-intention, merely space constraints.)

Could these be the difference? Then why is it that so many of the products of all these schools seem to find foreign pastures in which to flourish?

Then I reflected on the University College of the West Indies (UCWI) and its independent successor, UWI, which rapidly boasted stellar performance of early cohorts, both staff and students, attested to by various independent assessments.

What's going wrong? Contemplating these puzzles, I open an email from a colleague of lofty international stature in economics, someone whom we had earlier, for a variety of reasons, lost to UWI.

What he described was a quality my friend, the late Carl Stone, championed - the role of the 'master craftsman'.

It is interesting. He shared with me his postgraduate studies' supervisor Richard Goodwin's letter to him from Cambridge, which spoke of Robert Solow as 'a former student, who has now, happily, surpassed his master - as you will no doubt do'. My friend, in my view, actually has, even though he is too modest to admit, and of course Solow was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in economics. But Goodwin went further.

He expressed admiration for Paul Samuelson, the economist whose work to so many students of economics was an initiation right, for his "generosity to anyone his 'junior' and his natural hostility to all his 'seniors'."

These episodes and precepts my friend stressed, have "guided me in my relationships with my own students. I have always started any friendship with a possible student with the assumption that he or she has natural tendencies to develop a potential that will surpass anything I may have achieved. If not, what's the point?"

Then there are tidbits of intellectual and academic history. Isaac Barrow resigned so that his student Isaac Newton could succeed him; G.E. Moore resigned his Knightbridge professorship so that his student Ludwig Wittgenstein could succeed him; Schumpeter resigned from Harvard when Samuelson was denied tenure; Hicks resigned his Drummond professorship to enable Matthews to succeed him; thus is greatness defined. When G.E. Moore resigned he wrote: 'How can I justify being a professor when Wittgenstein is still a student'."

Along with this, I recalled Malcolm Gladwell's work suggesting the Beatles grueling performance in Hamburg, Germany for a 48-night residency at the Bruno Koschmiders Indra club, among other preparations, were absolutely essential to their achievement of 'stardom'.

I went back to the empirical work of psychologists and others that indeed suggest the minimum time, the magic number for 'experience' or preparation for achieving world-class performance, is 10 years.

The latter are studies of chess masters, composers, mathematicians and artists. They all put in 10 years of intensive practice and learning. Then there's the Louis Pasteur maxim: Inspiration comes only to the prepared mind.

So there is ability, but there must also be sweat. This is buttressed by good teaching and mentoring. It is made so much easier, pleasant and enjoyable if the teacher, like Samuelson, exhibits that generosity of spirit in positive encouragement.

Developed country status by 2030?

Obviously, it won't be bauxite, it hasn't been. Hundreds of years of sugar didn't cut it either. And I'll wager even oil shan't. So to our people we must turn; to our young people first. But it is absolute nonsense to put competent experience to pasture for the sake of political or other differences.

There are better ways to consensus from disputed objectives, ways indeed that make the compromise, though not pure, more likely to be achieved.

wilbe65@yahoo.com