Those who think for themselves know that that the cobwebs they spin are fragile and incomplete; but those content to be disciples and become entangled in the gossamer of others, forget that brittleness and imagine that they have landed on stable ground. Franchised ideas, which were originally intended to be only skeletal in creating a fledgling system of schooling in the Caribbean have hardened and fossilised. Ideologies have become dogma and curiosity, which should blow like the trade winds across the Lesser Antilles have become motionless. But it does not have to be this way. The future is always open to suggestions. There is no immaculate perception. The past is always ahead of us and it bleeds backwards into the present. New education systems will not simply appear out of the blue but will require deliberate effort. Wellbeing and freedom to live a decent human life need to be the ultimate objective of the economy. Ours is a diasporic society. It is an inheritance of tremendous worth. Failure to embrace it as an asset would be a catastrophe. Distance was never an obstacle in our history, and distance across the globe today can no longer limit the distribution of probabilities. We are entangled in the World Wide Web. Stimuli travel as free signifiers independent of causes; the global borders on the local, and the other way round. Initiatives remain local, but it is now the turn of the intractable and the unpredictable that put them stubbornly beyond the reach of the predicting, planning and steering influences of their proposers. Santayana describes culture— all culture, any culture—as a knife pressed against the future. Culture must be about making things different from what they are, the future unlike the present. Walcott reminds us that once “We were the colour of shadows when we came down/ with tinkling leg-irons to join the chains of the sea,” but today the “New Europeans” arriving from Syria into Friedman’s flat world have forced our postmodern “Old World” citizens to accommodate the permanent global practice of living with strangers and their difference daily. The colonial recipe of assimilation and conversion when dealing with difference is no longer tenable in a multicentred world. Postmodern Europe has emerged ashen-faced in the midst of its present migration crisis, very much like our ancestors from the Bight of Benin and the berths of Kolkata who, from an overcrowded barracoon, crossed the Middle Passage to become plantation labourers in a New World. Massimo D’Alema points out that cultural métissage or hybridisation is unavoidable. It triggers a mixing of cultural inspirations. In the end it becomes a source of enrichment and an engine of creativity. The schooling of a newly arriving Asiatic indentured labouring class at institutions separate from the rest of the population in Trinidad and Tobago has had enduring consequences. Amin Maalouf concludes that when the traditions of the original culture are respected, the immigrant feels less rejected on account of his or her different identity. This in turn makes them more open to the cultural options of the new country, and the less likely they will appear to hold on to their separateness. Even so, there is only a fine thread that separates enrichment from erasure. The veritable Babel and varieties of life-worlds that was Trinidad’s linguistic lushness included speakers of Yao, Warao, Kalina, Lokono, Carinepagoto, Chaima, Kalipunian, Chaguane, Igneri, Nepoio, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, Lisboa Portuguese, Spanish, Akan, Mandinka, Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, Kikongo, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Sindhi, Gujarati, Nepali, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Urdu, Telugu, Hakka, Cantonese, north Levantine (Syrian and Lebanese) Arabic and English. Life in the confluence of these multiple Vygotskian zones of proximal development is an advantage that has slipped through our fingers like sand. Eric Heisserer’s 2016 film, Arrival, is an unnerving lamentation of the paradise we have lost. The languages we listen to, speak, read and write impact, reflect and shape the way we think and how we perceive the world. Alejo Carpentier in The Lost Steps envisions the postcolonial project as an engagement with the past that creates a new, unpredictable and unknown future that can yield immense originality. Inherent in such a task is the impulse to commemorate the past as much as to celebrate the possibility of producing an entire New World reality. Embracing a paradisal perspective on the new world is crucial if education is to have any chance of driving innovation and entrepreneurship across these “leaves of brown islands” which “stick to the rim of this Caribbean” (Derek Walcott, The Schooner Flight). The Adamic innocence of the New World compels us to look at the awakening intelligence of the West Indian mindscape and the possibility of our children taking on Adam’s task of naming the world. Like “nail holes of stars in the sky roof” they have the potential to illuminate and change the world. The task is how to get beyond the colonial circle of white boulders that ring the flagstaff and unfurl their capabilities and to let their curiosity blow freely across the curriculum.
