Wilberne Persaud, Financial Gleaner Columnist

MY FIRST funeral atten-dance was that of my father. Fourteen years old, I made a secret pact with myself never to attend another. How silly of me.

Excusable by virtue of grieving or youth?

Time passed and duty dictated I attend several. Again, upon private personal reflection, never shared with anyone until now, I thought to myself there was one problem with Shakespeare's uncannily perceptive pronouncements on human nature and life in general.

Mark Anthony told us the good that men do is oft interred with their bones.

Leaving complex analysis of Shakespeare aside, I often had difficulty determining if the person described in eulogy really was the individual people knew.

Good wasn't interred with bones; good was being fabricated without, despite bones. It was as if the aphorism 'speak no evil of the dead' had morphed into 'create only good for the dead'.

Absolutely committed

We lost former Pro Vice Chancellor and first principal of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus, Leslie Robinson. Unable to attend the thanksgiving service, I read the tributes.

No legend was being created. Indeed, more could be said of his contribution to education and nation building in Jamaica and the Caribbean. Leslie Robinson was absolutely committed to Jamaica and the Caribbean. It was tough, emerging at the time he did, to be otherwise.

His concern during the years in which I interacted with him, was for the future of his country. That translated readily into the future of the youth whose lives he thought he stood a chance of influencing positively. Leslie understood and appreciated the critical nature of education in any effort to create a well adjusted adult.

He was acutely aware that education was indispensable for building a sound economy, society and nation.

The Moyne Commission Report, which followed the disturbances of 1938, said about education: "Existing accommodation is frequently badly planned, and in a chronic state of disrepair and insanitation. Teachers are inadequate in number and are in most Colonies not well paid. Their training is largely defective or non-existent, and far too great reliance is placed on the pupil-teacher system; curricula are on the whole ill-adapted to the needs of the large mass of the population and adhere far too closely to models which have become out of date in the British practice from which they were blindly copied."

Evolve our system

A 1905 Colonial Office document, Special Reports on Educational Subjects, provides evidence by Inspector of Schools, a Mr. J.E. Williams: "The difficulties attending the education of the lower classes are not fully realised: we have had to evolve our own system, and it may well be that we do not know what is most suitable for the race that we have to do with. We have had to make teachers, and that cannot be done ina generation; irregularity of attendance cripples the efforts of such teachers as we have; and their efforts are still further thwarted by the influence of the children's lives at home and the examples of their parents.

"A system can hardly be said to be fairly and thoroughly at work till those who have passed through the schools fill the parents' class and it will be many years before that is true. Finally we are apt to forget that elementary education is only one of the means of civilisation. While the home life of most of the peasantry continues to be as uncivilised and demoralising as it is, the expenditure on elementary education must be partially wasted and disappointing."

These words, anchored as they are in the prejudices of the day, need analysis.

Leslie Robinson did this analysis. He and others like him emerged out of this adversity. His life's work seems to have been an effort at fulfilment of a commitment to make Inspector of Schools Williams' report including its prejudices obsolete.

This is a work in progress. We best honour his memory by pursuit of its completion.

Leslie possessed a turn of phrase anchored in his fascination with numbers and mathematics. Upon my query concerning a colleague formerly in the Mona Mathematics Department of UWI being, in my view, unfairly treated, Leslie responded, "You know 'x's problem is that he is non-normal."

Walking towards the Ring Road, I responded, "But Leslie, I thought that is what our university, any university was meant to accommodate, if not actively encourage."

"Yes," he said, "but you have to take on the battles you must and try to win."

That battle was won but are we losing the war?

wilbe65@yahoo.com

Source: Financial Gleaner, April 20, 2007