The knowledge deficit

Marina Salandy-Brown writes a weekly column for the Newsday. 

What should our young people know or consider important about the broader context of their lives when we live with an incessant shifting in global affairs? My recent encounter with a group of TT young adults underscored just how difficult that question is to answer.

UWI academic Winston Suite has been speaking out about the crisis in our education system as he experiences it at university, at both graduate and post-graduate levels. He is not alone. Teachers at all stages of the education system complain about the stultifying general lack of knowledge and unpreparedness of most of their students.

The sciences, based on fact, proven after long observation and by foolproof methodology, may be less affected, although the rapidly changing world of modern technologies has its own demands and the role of science is to understand and advance. The social sciences and arts, even though they also enable us to understand the world, do however present different challenges since they require a thoroughly imaginative approach based on knowledge that is not fixed and can only be gleaned through wide reading.

As part of a project run by the Bocas Lit Fest, an NGO founded to encourage reading as a useful tool for gaining knowledge and self-development among our young people, I accompanied two of four winning writers of young adult literature who visited TT for a writers’ tour. Four schools came together in south Trinidad and participated in a Q&A session.

I believe all the adults present were very surprised that none of the couple hundred students there, aged 14-18, admitted to knowing what segregation was. One or two knew what a boycott was. But these young people are not unique. I remember being surprised that a group of young New York African-Americans knew almost nothing about the US civil rights movement and the battles fought for the freedoms they enjoy.

The conclusion could be that our young people are ignorant and undereducated. That might be true given the understandable narrowness of the national curriculum and that many students live difficult personal lives that lack adequate parental and financial support, but it did make me consider the dangers of not knowing the past and how that helps explain why we are being ushered back into another phase of world history, one that those before us already lived through with dire consequences.

It is clear to most of us that we are in the midst of a global upheaval in which many of the truths we knew are being questioned and new paradigms are emerging, putting us off our stroke. US President Donald Trump has just ended a tour of the Far East in which he struck another blow against globalisation and reinforced a new nationalism that is taking hold, most clearly in the USA and Europe.

Brexit, Trumpism, the almost unbelievable events in Spain where Catalonia took active steps to secede and was violently halted by the national defence, and the hate marches in Poland last week against Muslims and other immigrants bring us up short.

In both Spain and Poland, where dictatorships deprived citizens the right of assembly or speech for several decades, young people now hanker for a return to a politics that could restore the bad old days. That the European Union was created to prevent war and violent oppression is lost on them, as is the fact that the UN is an agent of peace.

We do not learn from history and I understand therefore why history is a repeating cycle of globalisation (empires) and de-globalisation (city states and nation states), of war and peace and why events along the way are mere footnotes. What is new is the internet. With approximately 3.5 billion users, it is creating a borderless, ungoverned world in which information is limitless and uncontrolled.

Navigating that, paradoxically, requires real knowledge, something in woefully short supply.

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