By Nahdjla Bailey
CONTINUING Claudia Johnson’s address of 1980, not 1990 (see note at end), entitled ‘’An Education for Civilized Living’’, whose first instalment was reproduced in the Weekend VOICE of 9/4/16 under the headline “The More Things Change…’’ , here is Part 2. Now, I had intended in this part, to go straight into the section on the Constitution and the people’s relationship to it, but will be faithful to the sequence which the speaker established in getting to that point, and therefore proceed thus:
“What, then, might you ask is the connection between the classroom teacher and the establishment of a durable national consensus based on sound principles and lasting values? The fact is that every community, including our own has a core of basic values, ideals and convictions and must charge some authority such as the Family, the School and the Church with the task of inculcating those principles and promoting those standards among its very young This process is germane to the very survival of society itself.
Despite these obvious social and ethical imperatives, it would be true to say that our whole formal, educational system is still too narrowly circumscribed within the academic and technical fields, and the school curriculum is devoid, for example, of so vital a subject as Civics. Equally, there is, yet, no serious effort to groom our young people for that most ubiquitous of all vocations – Parenthood.
And yet, it is on the quality of our Family Life and the brand of Citizen produced (invariably the two are closely linked) that the entire future of our nation depends. Furthermore, good Citizenship is the nursery of Good Statesmanship.
Can we afford to leave these developments to mere chance? I think not. It is thus no accident that the Extra Mural Department, in conjunction with the St Lucia Christian Council, has selected Family Life Education to be the theme of our next Public Education Series in the 80/81 Academic Year.
However, if we are to lay a solid foundation for the kind of responsible, caring and truly democratic society, that we all wish to see develop in St Lucia, then specific programmes should be introduced in all schools to educate our young people for these important, primary social roles.
N.B. As mentioned above, the address under discussion was given in 1980, not 1990 as had been stated in Part 1. You see, I’ve been working from faintly typed (old manual typewriter), somewhat perished, thirty-six year-old sheets where the scratched ‘8’ in ‘1980’ appeared to be a ‘9’. I therefore stand corrected after receiving a call from an interested – and interesting – reader who informed me that he’d attended the graduation ceremony in 1980 and even today has not forgotten that speech by Mrs Johnson, which created a lot of buzz and could not have been more timely and necessary. He set the scene for me: among other dignitaries in attendance were Mr Boswell Williams, Acting Governor General as well as Mr George Odlum, Minister of Foreign Affairs.
I, myself, had not yet relocated to the island, so happily missed the still incredible foulness of 1979. But I have to say that after finding my sister’s speech while doing some spring cleaning, and reading through it, I did scratch my head a couple of times as some of the phrases therein gave me pause in relation to the 1990 date – for instance, ‘our young nation, barely emergent from its swaddling clothes’ – and I remember thinking, What! An eleven-year-old baby! Then there was ‘over the past several months, wracked by the public and private controversies of an extraordinary nature which have threatened to destroy the very social fabric of our country…’ Dead giveaways, right? So, in the final analysis, the speech becomes even more significant, and Saint Lucians must never allow any set of people, any particular group of their compatriots, to ever repeat the events of that time. Thanks to you, sir, for being interested enough to call up and set things right… You’ll like to know that next week, the speaker continues in this way: Let us briefly examine the significance of these twin pillars of society – the Family and the Polity – within the St Lucian context.
You have made little effort to summarize:
You interject the “foulness” of 1979 like a hit & run driver.
The buttresses that you scaffold the speech with render it more nebulous,
Sort of like the planets Jupiter, Uranus , Neptune- gigantic but gaseous.
Where is your core thesis statement?
Nevertheless, you do point out an intergenerational difficulty in the mentoring/coaching/teaching settings in St. Lucia; i.e.,
-a reliance on rehashing without contemporary FUSION opportunities
-lacking motivation for INNOVATION
-nurturing METACOGNITIVE abilities
-promoting thinking and listening as a a prelude to speaking or publishing.
Your sister’s speech should be taken in the context that investing our limited resources in the Health and education of children. youth & young adults – as a holistic prevention /preparatory mandate is on the front burner of national fiscal policy.