Queen’s College alumni from the Diaspora, the majority of them old boys from the late 1950s and early 1960s, have already started to arrive for next week’s reunion hosted by the Queen’s College Old Students’ Association (QCOSA).
This year is the 165th anniversary of the founding of QC and it will be the first time since the school’s sesquicentennial in 1994 that a considerable number of old students will gather in Guyana. The reunion will include a Grand Assembly in the QC Auditorium, mentoring sessions with current students, and various social and sporting activities.
One of the driving factors for this reunion appears to have been the realization that for the pre-Independence generation of students, all now men over 60 and with the Grim Reaper adding to his harvest every year, this might be the last opportunity for many to get together again to relive the happy – for many, the happiest – days of their youth, to pay homage to their intellectual and spiritual formation at Queen’s, to celebrate their achievements, to remember classmates whom they will meet no more, and to come together as one, in the relatively new but still hallowed auditorium of their cherished alma mater. Clearly, underlying the sense of nostalgia and celebration, there is a certain poignancy to the event.
But there is also the business of fundraising and support to be considered, as representatives of the various chapters of old students to be found in the UK and North America will review their strategies for continuing to give something back to the school that gave them so much.
Those coming back, however, even if they have been regular visitors to their homeland over the years, will find the school and the nation much changed from the halcyon days of their youth. Of course, the fundamental problem of looking back is that, like Orpheus looking back prematurely for Eurydice as he leads her out of the underworld, golden memories can be subverted irrevocably when nostalgia comes face to face with reality. Next week’s reunion will therefore also have its bitter sweet moments as memories kept alive over the years come under threat from the changed reality of contemporary QC and the fragile reality of life in Guyana.
But let us focus on contemporary QC. Those returning old boys, who knew only the joys of a single sex school, will encounter an almost unrecognizable QC. Taught and mentored by the last expatriate masters from the colonial metropolis, nurtured to Independence by a generation of outstanding Guyanese masters and a few doughty female teachers, the majority of the former themselves old boys, the QC boys of the mid-1950s to 1966 found themselves the beneficiaries of an educational legacy harking back to the public schools and grammar schools of England, and were imbued with an ethos derived from colonial – some would say, old fashioned – and mainly masculine notions of honour, discipline, duty, esprit de corps and the urge to perform to the best of their respective abilities in the classroom, in debating, drama, the arts and the sciences, and on the sports field. The bad old days of the anti colonial creed were arguably, in many respects, the good old days for many QC boys of the era.
Indeed, many of these attitudes and values would carry over to the post-Independence period, right up to the education “reforms” of the Burnham administration in the mid-1970s, culminating in the introduction of co-education in 1975.
And it is co-education that is most visibly responsible for the changed QC that the old boys will encounter, at the same time that the less tangible shift in the country’s moral compass and the natural generational shift that one would reasonably expect would account for the very changed nature of the school today.
The old boys will find a school dominated by female teachers and students – a friendlier, more caring, softer environment perhaps – but a school, in which the traditional male virtues of bonding through sport and mischief, and the honour code of not snitching and taking one’s punishment “like a man”, which used to be peculiar to schoolboys across the British Empire, are in serious decline. In addition, from a school of some 800 boys to one of half that number, the talent pool to sustain QC’s rich heritage in sports like cricket, football, athletics, table-tennis and hockey, has been quite literally decimated.
In academics, moreover, girls now tend to dominate, perhaps a reflection of their natural tendency to mature faster than boys. Without descending into sexist and baseless arguments for why girls are doing better than boys nowadays, it is a fact that boys do not have the role models on the teaching staff and perhaps the accompanying combination of firm discipline and understanding of their motives and urges, to channel their energies into more productive modes of behaviour. Whatever the reason, the times have changed forever.
There is no point therefore in seeking to recreate the past, even as it is celebrated and some aspects yearned for. No, the best thing that the returning alumni can do this coming week is to recognize that change happens and resolve to continue to support the efforts of today’s students and staff to maintain the high standards with which QC has always been associated.
Who knows? By their own contributions, by sharing their experiences and lessons from the past, with sensitivity and understanding, they might help to influence the thinking of this and future generations to maintain an ethos of excellence, rooted in the legacy of the past, but not held captive by it, whilst simultaneously looking resolutely ahead to the challenges of the future. And all while having one heck of a reunion!
