Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine is a former QC student skilled in constitutional reform, political transition, parliamentary procedure, democratization, institutional strengthening, electoral systems planning, implementation and observation, inter-ethnic peace-building, social partnerships, teacher training, media and the visual arts. He is an internationally recognized expert on the life and work of Martin Carter and is a prolific writer of books, journals and scholarly papers. He shares his experience and knowledge with students, teachers, governments and institutions all over the world and is currently the Principal of the Critchlow Labour College.
Let me begin with an episode. One day in the late seventies, as I was walking along Croal Street, I was summoned from across the street, near to his chambers, by the late Cleveland Hamilton, the poet, lawyer and one time Mayor of Georgetown. He broke off the conversation he was having and proceeded to ask me, in a grave manner: “Who were your teachers, young man?” I was taken aback and clearly at a loss to answer, having had more than a fair share of teachers in many parts of the world. He saw my confusion. “Not those learned professors from your expensive universities. I mean your real teachers.” He meant of course my first teachers. On telling him that as a child I had attended Enterprise under R.B.O. Hart, Modern Education Institute of Onkar Narine, and finally BGET at the not-so-tender mercy of R.R. Baird, “Pirate” Alexander, R.E. Cheeks, and A.P. Alleyne, Mr. Hamilton chuckled and made approving noises of satisfaction and remarked on the soundness of such a foundation.
These urban legends belonged to a generation of exceptional educators, women and men, to be found in towns and villages across colonial Guyana. I had the good fortune to have fallen into the hands and under the spell of Teacher Tina who operated her nursery school under the house in which I was born, in Gordon Street, Kitty. This would have been in 1945, as the Second World War and my second year of life were coming to an end. Casting my mind back to those days of wonder and terror, I think it is safe to say that there was undoubtedly an excess of drilling and rote learning in their method, and I certainly recall more than an occasional excess of enthusiasm in the administering of punishment for work of low standard. What was never in doubt was the fierce emphasis on standards and excellence. It was taken for granted that in the pursuit of the unshackled mind, illiteracy and innumeracy, the twin pillars of enslavement, would fall away. The primary schools of British Guiana did not only serve as a step on the ladder to secondary school and beyond, but equipped entire generations for the world of work.
I begin there, at the beginning. I have not had the time to search out the empirical evidence to support my assertion, but I do not think it is controversial: the strength of our education system in the past was in the nursery and primary schools, many of them under the guidance of legendary teachers skilled in the art of awakening young minds, imparting the fundamentals, and instilling in the best instances and often against the tide of pedagogical crudeness, a passion for learning and discovery.
I should make two things clear at this point. 1. That I thought it best to speak out of my own direct experience rather than from Ministry reports, invaluable though those are. 2. The period of the past I speak of dates from the late forties to the early sixties. That is to say, from the bright days of hope and promise of the multi-racial anti-colonial upsurge to the dark days of despair and dislocation of the unrest and communal strife in the years that preceded Independence. There is not time and space enough to examine the complex and mediated ways in which the tensions coursing through the body politic came to impact on the classrooms of the country. We were, after all, lustily singing – well, some less lustily than others – God Save the Queen in our assemblies in the hallowed old hall well into the turbulent sixties.
Our generation was the first to breach the walls of privilege that had kept the children of the poor and the powerless out of the premier schools of the day, Queens and Bishops. The establishment of government scholarships and exhibitions by the short-lived multiracial PPP government of 1953, our first to be elected under adult suffrage without property limitations, opened the doors of these elite institutions to a small number of children who had been in rigorous training for the highly competitive examinations. I use the word training in the sense that athletes and horses train for the big race. The schools across the country were in competition. In my own school, BGET, Cheeks’ class was in fierce if unspoken competition with Baird’s class. Which school, which class within which school would have the glory of yielding up the county scholars? It is worth reminding ourselves: a sound education was universally held to be the gateway to the future, the means of escape from poverty and under-development, the way out of the economic and social constriction of colonial society.
In my own case, Queens was the reward. It is too long ago – 1954 – for me to remember as sensuously as I would like what it must have felt like to be absorbed so seamlessly into an environment that we had only dreamed of from a distance, that had been held up by parents and teachers and the entire society it seems as the acme of a child’s achievement and almost a guarantee of worldly advancement. As I cast my mind back, I am struck by the extent to which we were governed by a complex system of rules and regulations, affecting things great and small, and a fixed scheme of reward and punishment. Houses, prefects, monitors, detention, caning formed the architecture of control and discipline.
I later came to understand how much of our experience in and out of the classroom was being shaped by the ethos and Arnoldian traditions of the Victorian Public School: mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body, and all the rest of it. From early on we were instilled with the sense of responsibility to the traditions to which we were now heirs, traditions of scholarship in the classroom, prowess on the field of sports, and leadership within the group. The programme was clear and well entrenched from the beginning: as the cream of the crop, we were to be trained to take up our rightful place in the middle and upper echelons of the colonial hierarchy. We were the last of the colonially educated generations, the product of empire for the service of empire. The extent to which we would be able to retain, build on and deepen the best of the learned values while jettisoning what was backward-looking was to be the supreme test of my own generation. George Lamming put it this way when, in writing of Walter Rodney, he says: “the school became the most accessible means of rescuing their offspring from the enslavement of estate labour. But what began as a necessary strategy of self-emancipation would become, in our time, a major obstacle to national liberation. For the mystique of the educated one has proved to be a mystifying influence on the Guyanese and West Indian masses throughout the process of decolonization. It has been one of the permanent features of the imperial experiment. Education was a means of escape from the realities of labour, a continuing flight from the foundations of society. To grow up was to grow away. Cultural imperialism is not an empty or evasive phrase. It is the process and effect of a tutelage that has clung to the ex-colonial like his skin. It is the supreme distinction of Walter Rodney that he had initiated in his personal and professional life a decisive break with the tradition he had been trained to serve.”
What needs to be added is that along with the tradition we were being trained to serve, or even within it, we also extracted, if we were so inclined, the value and techniques of contestation and critical thinking and, in the best in
stances, the moral basis of private and public action. The recent note of greeting to the Reunion from Bobby Moore strikes a similar chord: “For 74% of its existence, QC was a classical colonial school. But as the school reached its golden age between the 1940s and 1960s, gradually the power and sophistication of its culture dialectically created its opposite: weariness for empire and a passion for a liberated Guyana.”
These were days when it was possible to be even busier out of the classroom than at our desks. Extra-curricular activities ranged from debating to bee-keeping, from the scouts and the cadet corps to the theatre and the choir and production of the school newspaper. Inter-house rivalry thrived in the realm of academics and in sports and games, not to mention in the competing splendour and creativity of the house feeds. (It is a particular grief for me to look at the sorry state of the sports ground which once was the scene of three cricket matches being played simultaneously, each with its band of noisy supporters). The possibilities opened up by the easy access to a wide variety of activities within the school were literally without limit. In cricket, to mention the sport with which I was mostly closely engaged, six members of the First eleven were called to practice for the colony in 1960 and 1961.
As you can imagine, all this made for a long school day and a full school life. When we factor in the engagement with the politics of the time and the distractions of the sentimental life, I am amazed to this day that so much could have been achieved by so many in the examination rooms and on the fields of play. What this brief glance backwards is intended to tell us is that the past, as someone said, if it is to serve the present, must be a springboard, and not a hammock.
