The rosary of my life is a string of beads, some broken and others intact and a few precious stations. There have been successes and some failures. I have always tried to change the world- to make it better than I found it. I hold the view the biological and cultural strands of development are contiguous. The human develops in an environment replete with cultural signs and codes as well as tools, languages and other artefacts.
These two strands of development merge into a specifically human form of development. While the development of tools, artefacts and language make rapid cultural growth possible, it’s intermingling with human development results in radically changed mental processes. Humans ‘change their minds’ by appropriating linguistic tools and using cultural artefacts as they grow and develop and these tools and artefacts are porous, changing as they are being mastered and used.
Therefore economic advance cannot be outside of human and cultural development. Development is freedom- freedom to be a thinking-man in society. In the New World however, many social representations are complexes. They are vague, fuzzy sets and sometimes incomplete wholes that are huddled around Gestalts into organised formlessness. This is an abiding concern that I return to over and over again since it impacts teaching, thinking and schooling in the West Indies.
