Chris Searle

. fnen :

Grenada Morning

We No_t Die. His words take up the banner denada s mornmg. A Jamaican youth is asking his What is justice, what 1s your concept of
Justice?
His friend replies:

Appendix
Building Popular Education: Grenada 1979-1983
It was the Grenadian people's insatiable thin.! for education and knowledge that was one of the major causes of revolutionary change in their country. This was, of course, a part of that craving for knowledge that has characterised the struggles of black and oppressed people throughout history, and expressed by our American sister Angela Davis as our furious impatience as regards the acquisition of education - a lamp into our people's feet and a light unto the path towards freedom During four centuries of British Colonialism the Grenadian people saw the colonial authorities build just one secondary school in their country - the Grenada Boys Secondary School. The people we..., taught to believe that education was not a right, hut a privilege and commodity that was unattainable for them. They watched the male children of the colonial elite pass to thia one school with their uniform and their books while, if they were lucky, they struggled to learn how to read from a precious family bible or a patient relative. They bad to listen to the insults and condescension of people wbo spoke a different Iangoage, the language of polis, which symbolised the power and authon? which was hurled against them. They learned to weigh and calculate the tonnes of sugar, b8118J1118, nutmegs and cocoa which they produced but which brought them no wealth or benefit and only softened the lives of the h d tna'lists and brokers coIomal plantocracy and t e m us here in Europe. They yearned for the po... r of::-ledge and the force and insights of analysiS. For . . f d and each genera on education symbolised ree om. th . hiJdren. wished it more and more earnestlY . :Ut that it The huge collective brain of the !'""." and all should be used to build a new life m through the Caribbean. 171

Justice is my right to live in dis ian' man ... JustiCe IS my right to work in dis /on: Justice is my nght to eat the food of dis ian'. Justice is my nght to share the things God put there for all a wi:
It is the same C an 'bb ean vmce, the vmce - . of Fedon and B ut1er, the voice of Maurice and Jackie of Unison . mce G and F't th e _vmce of those bold and ' patriotic ' V 1 zie, oun renadian soldiers, who even in the midst of their UtiOn's deadly confusion, still fought Reagan's -n:a places like Beausejour and Morne Rouge. ey rather . brave and be Ie tiful . tha n surren d er one mch of therr Island to the new imperialism and global aggressiOn of the Bank f A . national, the L o. menca, Rockwell Interindustrial-mill ockheed Arrcraft Corporation and the ing and stru warlords and predators of the workof th .gg g people of the world. It is the voice too e 1111pnsoned Hudson Austin Bernard . an d S e 1 wyn and Phyllis and They too d we must free to let them speak. inspired e and genius and love they all not d1e.

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Chris Searle A Negation of Education

So when the poorest and most exploited section of Grenada's people, the agricultural labourers, rose up against the permanent insult to their lives that was British Colonialism in 1951, that insult that valued the people's minds and intellects as less than a sack of nutmegs or a hand of bananas, a part of the energy that drove them forward was their dream of a better future for their children, a future which would give them the power to master and transform their small island. But with Eric Matthew Gairy, who led them and betrayed them, they only found that instead of the law of Westminster they had gained the law of the Mongoose Gang, instead of Buckingham Palace or Sir FranciS Drake they had projected before them Unidentified Flying Objects and occultist symbols, instead of Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington there were the Green Beast Army and Chilean-trained police. Instead of education and rationality there were superstition and obscurantism, mixed with the official aura of fear and repression which tortured and murdered them. They lived and experienced a negation of education. . . If the teachers moved to struggle for better condi lions for their children in their collapsing schools or sought professional self-respect they received death letters and vile threats: if you strike, you die 1 When the young school students of Sauteurs defied the dictator marched the length of the island to confront him in his office in the they were met with oily words empty Promises. When they marched shoulder to the striking urban workers in the 1973-7 4 Grenada, protesting against the brutality and P torture that surrounded them calling for a new SOciety whi h 0 ff ' th c ered a rea) future to its young people, and beaten up in the streets. Their publi; ando:.a education and a release from the boiled inside tibnal shame of the dictator's buffoonery aside as G t as they learned that the funds set 8 the West r=:da contributions to the University of 8 to pay for scholarships to their own regional ,_, --.aaverstty were b . . , emg used to pay for Gauy s

Grenada Morning!
decadent parties and the maintena!'ce of his hotel: brothels like the Evening Palace, wh1ch he had appro priated as a part of his personal fortune.

A New Dawn of Education

When this corruption was blasted from the country that revolutionary dawn of 13th 1979, the of Maurice Bishop speaking over RadlO Free Grena ' "bb ean Wl "th the clear message rang out across the C an te that this revolution was fundamentally about concre kt ake real that same benefits for the people, to see d '.' d their hearts: yearning for progress that ache mst e a 11

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. k,or,o ' ' od, I' 'or decent ThisrevolutionLSforwor b. ht housing and health services, and fora ng future for our children and grandchildren.
The foundation of that future . fi h with as qmc Y to Education, to Ims r f the colonial and practically possible, the deform! Ies o neo-colonial years. . ti n from the long It was an emancip:nothe great black brutality of Grenada s history. Wh_ hi book Bltu:k American, W.E.B. DuBois of American Reconstroction that the ema;;c'1":nd that the released slaves created a frenzy for sc O:d with desire for educablack oppressed were consumthe attitude to knowledge tion, he was also prophesymg . n. Foralmostassoon 10 . Grenad a bY itsRevou I1 set free m b o tall over the nabon, as the new freedom to urs ----entalise educa"bl to limit or nfin f . became Impossi e . . the institutional co es o tion. or see it merely wtthin 0 of the fli'St overschool, college or :;the Revolution was whelming truths and discoven "t was irrepressible! It . erywhere, l The that education was ev ide and at every came at once from every s turies of the people_s.U!'e dammed-up flood of rou:;,c:,., to connect, to know, to understand. was unstoppable. AI meew;::: to express sions. tbrouch songs, poe at rallies, at panel discUS

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plays and calypso, the message poured down upon the revolutionary leaders: Teach us, we want to know! Young and old, farmer and urban worker, fisherman and the women cracking nutmegs, seamstresses and roadworkers, all clamoured for more education, giving the cue for the slogan: Education is a must- from the cradle

Grenada Morning
people and their needs. It was a unique democratic assembly, with the teachers discussing and formulating suggestions in the workshop sessions, and beginning to lay new parameters for the future development of the schools, and while this was happening in the capital, the Ministry appealed to the parents of school students and the students themselves to take over their schools for those two weeks and do as much basic repair and decoration work as they could manage, in order to arrest the decay and dilapidation into which the schools had fallen under the dictatorship. With tremendous hard work and dedication, they managed to complete over a million dollars' worth of work and badly- needed renovations to the physical plants of schools. This was testimony to the faith the people had in Education. They understood that now the schools were theirs, that the gulf which separated the school as a colonial fortress of hostile attitudes and alienated knowledge from the people it had pretended to serve, was now filled in. These events of January !980 were of symbolic as well as practical importance to the Revolution. They demonstrated to teachers and parents that whatever action the revolutionary government would take in relation to education in the country, its hallmark would be one of democracy, of involving teachers ":"d parents and bringing them directly mto the plaTITUII/J and implementation of what was to be the form and content of school life. The New Jewel Movement always said that organisation is our only weapon and mentally saw Education as embedded m theuciples of participatory organisation. In every orgamsational step they sought to take there was a lesson to be learned, a mistake to be analysed and corrected, and basic to organisation in the sector as many other was a profound belief in plaTITUII/J Planning had been a concept entirely foreign to the dictatorship. Gairy operated in such an anarchic, laissez,faire way, depending, like some on whims, superstitions, hunches, favountJ.sm an of bery, that his years in pow<;r a vacuum lanning. The Revolution inhented an empty treaaur)', . . f infrastrUctures and a demoralP a wholesale cavmg-m 0 . _,.._,na 1.oe there wu no ised public sector. As m e

to the grave. As the process moved into 1980, the first full year of the Revolution, dubbed The Year of Education and Production, the people began to realise more and more that the Revolution had brought a new totality of life in itself, and that Education was an essential and permanent part of that process. They began to understand that the Revolution is Education and Education is the Revolution. They are inseparable and utterly dependent upon each other, for every part of the advance of the Revolution brought new insights, and those insights themselves brought the knowledge and understanding to take the next steps. Every part of the process mvolved learning, doing, analysing, reflecting, learning and doing again in a continuous dialectic. This is why Bishop referred to the country as a big and popular and w_hy, in spite of the tragic irony we recognise now m the title, 1983 was named The Year of Political and Academic Education.

Education: a Part of the Way Society is Organised

During the frrst month of 1980 the Year of Education andProduclion, the Ministry of 'Education organised an which proved to be a clear indicator of the way in they would ?rganise and progress. This was the :'::mal T_eachers Sem<nar, held in the Regal Cinema capttsl, St. George's. The Ministry called all its ac ftoom their schools, and with the willing coof the Grenada Union of Teachers assembled iv elm or a tw?"week seminar, in which they all collect Y anatom.tsed the question . . . t he country Th of E ducatton m e teachers heard the contributions and placed in of each of the Ministers, and these were he context of the educational future for the

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Chris Searle sn;ategy in education, simply to "carry on", with twothirds of the teachers untrained, the secondary school students still paying fees with dog-eared textbooks and readers that were hand-me-downs from Canadian charities and British library throw-outs and teachers emigrating almost as an automatic readtion as soon as they received a teaching certificate. Perhaps the most endurmg mon'!ment to education under the dictatorship is to be seen m the siting of Hillsborough Junior Secondary School in Carriacou. To cut financial comers and thus aid funds towards his personal coffers, Gauy s gemus for planning resulted in this school actually being erected on the site of a pond which, in the season annually fills up and floods the school, making the school grounds a haven for swarms of mosquitoes. Revolution developed a synthesis of mass orgamsabon and mass education primarily through the Centre (or Popular Education, the main mechanism that was built for adult and further education. The Ministry of Education was faced with an illiteracy rate of some seven (7%) and this presented an actual and challenge to the Revolution. How could its ead truthfully talk about democratising the coun.. an WJ bo Its politica1 process, if a proportion of the people, wever stnall, remained illiterate? For education and d emocracy had b een so mter-dependent . as to become so had to go! The first phase of Augu camprugn against illiteracy which began in illite 8 0, was successful in that it reduced the under three percent (3\7,), but it did
An "Each one t each one" system was developed, depending the who were trained by had been pr ec teal who themselves from litera.,;'P:;::,t mternationalist assistance renowned Brazilia ers m Jamaica and Cuba, and the teen were you n:ducator, Paulo Freire. The volunbold, and many of them were school teachers spent a day 11110rtti, !ore their CPE classes, already tackled tbell' ev . g m thel!' classrooms before they en111g sessions: I t soon became apparent Pl'<>gramm., that this was haVIIlg a very dynamic effect

Grenada Morning upon the entire society. New social infrastructures and connections were being created and the mobilisation of the people involved in the CPE became the nascent organs of community power which would later develop into the Parish and Zonal Councils. The programme gave to many of the young volunteer teachers an apprenticeship in communal organisation, and proved to them that the people could construct close and mutually beneficial relationships around the transmission of knowledge, using a mass, popular education programme as an overall vehicle. The CPE helped to revive the co-operative "maroon" tradition of the people, and through the regeneration of popular culture that resulted from the songs, poetcy and emulatiOn sessions in which both students and teachers participated, it proved how education itself can an effective creator and mobiliser of new and consctous cadres. The same lesson was clear within the ranks of the mass organisations of youth and women. became a vital component to both the National Women's Organisation (NWO) and the National Youth Organisation (NYO). As the membership of both organisations increased substantially, particularly fore their congresses in late 1981, mass began to be organised in the fonn of courses, semmars . . and panel dtscusstons at branc h a nd pan'sh leveL . For the youth in particular, the question of educatiOn and those new the question of finding work and trammg or . e skills that had to be learned as the requl!'ements growth of Grenada's national economy preoccupe e work and organisation of the NYO. 'cularemphasis FortheNWOtherehadbeenaparti . nd . . be nd djscussmg a upon educatmg tts mem rs aroufi f women. and proposing new laws of thr attacking their 'sexpl01tst1on and d the Equal Pay for tically analysed and past. The Maternity Leave Law an Equal Work decree .were the nation before discussed by women s the amendmenta that the they were finally passed theY needed- Both orgamorganised women lopment of fraternal and sations also studied t e evnalle _weD as the historY temaUO Ysister movements m

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of Grenada and topics of world affairs and health issues which affected them particularly,like the dangers of the contraceptive drug Depo Provers and the nutritional value of local foods.

Grenada Morning
Thus the councils became forums for the continuing education and active participation of the people, as they learned of the problems, achievements and plans of the Electricity Company, the Central Water Commission, the Health Inspectors or the Police, together with adding their own suggestions and criticisms to draft laws that were recommended and discussed like the Rent Restriction Act or the National Insurance Scheme. The people were learning the chemistry and physics of their nation, of what it is made and how it works, and in doing so they were understanding the true exercise of people's power. These democratic assemblies, they knew, were not the colonial mimicry of Westminster or the discredited Big Ben politics, they were learning that education means institutional revolution too! The new organs of their participatory democracy knew no previous models and had to be created through the struggle of the people themselves in direct response to their actual conditions and the ascendant power of the working people. They were the first structures that were set up on the way towards formulating the new democratic which was being drafted by a constitutional commtssiOn of regional lawyers in the period leading up to the death of the Revolution.

Education: a Part of the Democratisation of Society

During the time of opposition to the Gairy dictatorship the New Jewel Movement recognised the fundamental connection between education and genuine popular power. As they organised Freedom Schools and tine parish assemblies with the Mongoose Gang m brutal pursuit, the party militants learned that any significant change in their society could only come w1th a complete transfonnation in the way in which decisions were made. Peopk's participation and involvement became the bedrock of the NJM's politics and featured largely in the 1973 Party Manifesto. The idea that education should be locked away in schools was anathema. The Party sought to educate the people about the content and abuse of power at the mass assemblies of 15,000 people like the People's Congress that was held in 1973 at Seamoon Stadium. Th1s trsdition was consolidated and developed during the years of the Revolution. In 1981 the Ministry of National Mobilization was established, with the prime function of organising mass democracy, and this was soon followed by the setting up of Parish Councils and Workers' Parish Councils. At these local people's a_ssemblies, held every month, prospective new legislation was examined, discussed and new amendments were proposed, and government ministers, senior civil and the managers of state enterprises were mstructed to report to the people in order to account for the progress and performance of the various sectors. It genuine .. actional" education, to use the expression 0 .:a.ulo Freire, in which the people openly debated, en and formulated new proposals. Soon the so large that they had to split into a zone bemg a cluster of VIllages m a

i .

Education as part of the Building of the Economy

Economics has often been called the "dismal but during the years of the Revolution the Grenadian people found it anything but dismal and bonng. J : listen to how many of the calypsoes over that. pen d were written on the theme of economic constructJOD the distribution of wealth around the world! It was c ear to the People's Revolutionary mic forces are the power that canhe!t ;r :They had no from or crus tt ea illusions about that. be task was to build They knew their num that. how could a sound and growmg economy. Je and t3:l 000 a struggling little country of 100 peoP

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square miles advance an inch? So for Grenada, educa tion towards economy consciousness was imperative. The people must know and understand the economic forces at work around them, they must know the direction and details of the national economy. They must also have the opportunity and training to contribute to its planning and formulation, and to this end the Revolution set in practice the democratisation of economics through the People's BudgeL In 1982 and 1983 the accounta and books were laid open to the people and their organisations at mass seminars, conferences and local councils. All the data on the economy and the previous year's performance was presented for mass scrutiny and criticism. For the Revolution consistently declared the necessity, both moral and political, to be totally honest with the people and to show and explain everything to them, so that they would know that the economy can only develop through, as the Finance Minister Bernard Coard often expressed it, the synthesis of people and professionalism. During the weeks of the People's Budget in January and February, ministers, planners, economists and statisticians came out from behind their desks, left their offices and went to Zonal Councils in villages all over the country, clarifying the terminology, explaining the meaning of Gross National Product, of the difference between Recurrent and Capital Expenditure and the Social Wage. You would have heard working people in Grenada discussing these topics quite naturally on buses, in rum shops or as they rapped on street comers. For the Grenada Revolution the people's education also meant de-mystifying the most vital and all-embracing sub)ect of the people's lives - money- and making the enbre a vast popular school of economics, the subject that is most key to the national curriculum. Thus the NJM learnt of the necessity to trust the people absolutely with the formulation of the most vital they had: economic construction, and the Budget Itself, the very guts and dollars of national development For when Coard, as Minister of Finance read out the final Budget on Budget Day to the masse;of the people, be knew that 88 well 88 the political direction of the pernment and the professional expertise of econo-

Grenada Morning mists and planners, it contained the vital developments! fuel of the democratic will of the people.

Education as a Part of Work, and Work as a Part of Education

The Revolution soon realised that education could only have meaning if it was integrated with production. This is why it attached so much importance to the slogan Education is Production too!, and why it believed so profoundly in the words of that great Caribbean man, Jose Marti of Cuba, who once wrote:
Since man is living, he must be prepared for life by education. In school he must learn to manage the forces against which he hos to struggle in life. The pen should be wielded at school in the afternoon, but in the morning, the hoe. Teach the land, the varied and throbbing living land, to him who must live upon it and from it!

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The new education system needed to give students a greater insight into the crucial factor in all lives of production, and it signalled this with the openmg of five new farm schools and the introduction of Agricultural Science in a systematic way into the O:Sining of teachers. Many schools developed their own agncultural plots through the Community School Day Programme, when community volunteers and. parents instructed the children in a variety of productive and cultural activities on the day when tramee t .na classes. teachers were haVIng therr m-sel"Vlce . 1 But parallel with productive work entenng drrect y into educational institutions, education also workplaces. Workers involvedkl study at work through the wee Y or ers . f Classes, studying their own history classes in their own Hence the reminiscences and cntica :n and every worker a slogan: Every student a wo er,

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student. It was soon found that greater consciousness of struggle makes for greater production, and the Revolution was moving towards the situation where workplaces were also becoming schools and schools were becoming production centres. In this way Grenada's working people were learning that hatred of work, and the conception of work itself as a savage defonnity- as it undoubtedly was during the history of slavery and colonialism - can be transformed so that work itself, the great builder of the economy and the future, will lose its stigma of alienation and fear.

Grenada Morning after the visa that would mean an escape to Brooklyn, Toronto or London. 13th March 1979 blasted away any vestige that suggested that this small country was merely an outpost of the commonwealth or an island ghetto. Through practical and concrete solidarity that was offered from many sources, a new understanding of international friendship developed. Grenadians learned of the generosity of other nations, some of them poor like their own, who gave their practical solidarity. None more than Cuba who came forward with invaluable technical assistance, particularly in the construction of the international airport, and the fifteen other nations who contributed to this major capital project They also learned much from many individual internationalist workers who came from many countries in the region and other parts of the world to lend their expertise to the revolutionary process. The lessons of internationalism demonstrated time and time again that the real enemy was imperialism, that it has no colour but wears all colours but that the progressive and working people of those whose governments frowned and the Revolution were not themselves Its enemtes, but tts allies, and they were often a continuous sou_rce support to the Grenadian process through thetr s?h. groups an d f nen d s hi p socte ties The RevolutiOn danty . stood firm with the struggles of all peoples. agall?st imperialism, in the same internationalist which those same peoples supported Grenadads an . . . stand . F oretgners who ' ted Grena a were unpenalist . vt's1 . . able to hear and participate m mass meellllgs . . . wh'IC h the people werelearnmg and panel d1scusswns m N" . . . st impenahsm m .. lCar& of the heroic resistance agam Sahara or gua, Angola, Mozambique, the Western of Lebanon, and understanding the struggles1 Palestine, Chile, Namibia, South Afnca the island. dor. The world and its pe.ople were and the island was entenng the wo them Thus the people of Grenada were d the forces selves about the forces of progress an

Education for Popular Health

The development of Primary Health Care and the Revolution's emphasis upon a preventative approach to medicine was also necessarily an emphasis upon popular education In the process of organising against disease, the people also learned about disease and its prevention. Perhaps the most outstanding instance of this took place during the campaign to prevent an outbreak of Dengue Fever, which spread through the Eastern Caribbean in mid-1981. All over Grenada the people came out in community brigades for mass cleanups, destroying any opportunity for the breeding of the Aedes Egypti mosquito, which carries the disease. Thus Grenadians learned yet again of the vital educational thrust which combines democratic organisation, community solidarity and professional expertise and support coming through the Ministry of Health and the people's media It was a confirmation that the health of the people marches side by side with the education of the people.

Wl:r

ran....

Education through Internationalism

!:; Revolution brought an end to what T.A. Marryshow

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in Grenada, and the small that on one hand was locked in an vtewof the world, but on the other hand dreamed

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promoting backwardness and war on our planet through national and popular commitment to anti-imperialism, anti-racism and non-alignment.

Education through Vigilance

With the destabilising campaigns of imperialism striking out from every direction, through lies, slander and hostile propaganda in the region and a foreign press mastenninded by USICA, the United States International Comunications Agency, the propaganda arm of the US State Department, through incidents of arson, mercenary threats, bombs and terrorist attacks like that which killed three young Grenadian women at a rally in Queen's Park in June 1980, through diplomatic and economic destabilisation which attempted to isolate Grenada from its Caribbean neighbours and the sources of international funding, through attempts to infiltrate its trade union movement by the American Institute for Free Labour Development, the trade union ann of the CIA, through attempts to plant disease to attempts to stir up the local commercial class against the Revolution, the people learned the fundamental lesson of pennanent vigilance. This meant a practical education in forces seeking to turn back the Revolution. Grenadians learned that such education must take place with guns in their hands which is why their most fonnidable democratic achievement was the building up of a conscious, disciplined and vigilant militia, whose members came forward voluntarily to defend their Revolution because they understood and learned of the reality and demonic variety of im_perialist . destabilisation. They developed through this a practical and experientinl. education, as well as, in the words of the Prime Minister, a mental militia that to discriminate very quickly between what constituted a friend and what constituted an enemy of the Revolution. ed. themilitianotonlyengag. trammg but also a permanent education The militiamen and militiawomen had been oome of the most erudite teachers of the

detailed way that imperialism works from the inside: teachers like Philip Agee and John Stockwell, ex-CIA officers, who consciously decided to join the cause of the struggling people of the world, and who visited the country to give ita people their insights in what was, in effect, an anti-destabilisation education, in village councils and parish meetings all over Grenada. The educated response of the people caused these particular teachers to comment that Grenadians in fact knew more about the CIA than the American people them selves - and the insights they gathered, of course, in tum became the property of all the struggling people of the world

Language: an Articulate Revolution

The Revolution was in many dimensions an oral revolution, a process of meetings, public events, continuous discussion, analysis and vocal criticism. It meant that Grenadians used language in a more organised way than ever before. Thus it gave the people a totally different attitude to the language they spoke. They were recogmsing themselves as a bilingual people, with their own national language of the people vindicated and held m common respect for the first time in their history. The Grenadian dialect no longer carried a stigma or a badge of inferiority. All the submerged energy and of a long-suppressed Creole language was a_ccepte an celebrated as something which was undemably dian, a part of their character as a people, the earner of much of their culture. . Simultaneously, a motivation and. capactty .to master Standard English also grew considerably Wlthf ti" nalism and the use o the move outwards m mtema 0 h h this language as an international CPE the new language teaching me sm 8 Standard English as a second language, _and w hich saw . .cal and political tests and ideP. mass study of histon . COJil)IUIIld and power over the people were sharJII;ninl 8 . that both it and Standard English. while of -i vital to play m the reo e ..-bjective of c:reatinl both inAlde had I C consciouaness and the 0

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and outside the nation, a coherent and articulate people. This new confidence in language combined with an international outlook which meant that Grenada parti cipated in many of the world's great forums, from the United Nations to the non-aligned movement where its representatives proudly upheld the rights of smallisland states. This increased motivation to put the Grenadian revolutionary view, to conceptualise, to analyse and formulate independent positions through the democratic infrastructures which were being built internally, gave to the people a powerful ability to rationalise, and to fmally lift away the fog of obscurantism, superstitution and backwardness that threatened to smother them under the Gairy dictatorship.

Grenada Morning
Teach us we want to know Sing it in calypso: ' Education is production, So forward this revolution!

Education through the Achievement of Excellence

In Grenada colonial education had meant underfor four centuries. It was a savage underachievement, forced by the whip and the noose, and then by the hired thug and the UFO. So one of the fu'SI tasks of the Revolution was to set new objectives for the people, objectives of excellence andjustice, which would at begin to lay the criteria for their genius and make a dll'ect attack on the systematised educational underdevelopment of colonialism and Gairyism. One of the Revolution's major strategies was to foster the spirit of Emulntion among the people, in both work and study, to set targets for production and tbe accomplishment of tasks and then, in a framework of fraternal and sisterly competition, challenge the workers and students to achieve them. In secondary schools this often took the form of study drives and comradely contest among the students and between different schools. But clearly, the most significant factor in tbe rapid improvement of academic results from students was the Revolution's massive budgetary Illvestment in education. By 1983, one dollar in every two and a half dollars spent in the country from tbe national budget was being spent on education and health 3 7'h '7c of the budgetary aUocation. SecondarY school fees were completely abolished and more students than ever were studying at secondary with fifteen percent (15%) rise five l97!;;!!: PRG was heavily CQDllll.ltted to tbe tlw schools and in the fU"St year ol the Revolution ODiy ' school ' tbe COWIII'Y second-ever state the Bernadette Bailey ned, Ope wbowereantr . ..t edafteroneoftbeyouni-Qun , f>arltill.l-1980. by the imperialist bomb eea 131 ill The teacher-student 111ti01978, to 1-26 by J983. 1#1

Education through an Explosion of Culture

One of Grenada's dockworkers once said in an interview:
It have plenty brain between we, but it shy to

come up! This shyness and reticence that characteriseed many of the Grenadian people before the Revolution, the self-consciousness of being a 'small island', secondrate or unnoticed was replaced by an explosion of national self-assertion through the revolutionary culture. This was expressed not only through the calypso, music, drama, dance and oral poetry that was so widespread in Grenada during the years of the Revolution, but with a new dignity and satisfaction in the way people were seeing themselves. Certainly more Grenadians were writing poetry and performing calypso than ever before, and receiving publication and air-play. The lyrics of the calypsonians were a witty and critical commentary on the development of the process, and took on a new depth and meaning. The calypsonians were teaching people too, and the people were listening carefully and critically to what they were saying. As one tbe most calypsoes of tbe Revolution, ftOII>Ift/p, by Dr. DDt, expresaed in its chorus:

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Coming like a clarion call from that National Teachers' Seminar of January 1980 was a demand from the teachers for a totally new approach to teacher education. Only a third of Grenada's teachers were

Grenada Morning
results showed a percentage eleven times higher, moving from a mere three percent {3%) to thirty-two percent {32%) passes. In secondary schools too, although the Revolution had made the major investment priority at the level, '0' level results were seven percent

l.

trained at that point in time, so the task was to devise the most efficient, most economical, most pedagogically sound and most practical mass programme of teacher

education that would integrate theory with practice and simultaneously give the potential of transforming the curriculum. This emerged in October 1980 as the

{7%) higher and the performance of Grenada's students in the new Caribbean secondary school external examinations, the CXC, is shown in the following 1982 table of percentage pass rates, going from the bottom to the top:
Guyana

National In-Service Teacher Education Programme {NISTEP), which has since become a model for sister islands in the Caribbean. The trainee teachers came to
classes one day a week in one of the three centres that

Trinidad
Jamaica

were established in different parts of the country, and during the rest of the week they applied their insights in
their own classrooms, supported by a team of perma-

Barbados
Grenada

13.94% 17.49% 25.06% 28.33% 29.51%

.j

;, ,,

nent tutors and their own already-trained colleagues in their schools, who were called their teacher-partners. They studied Language Arts, Mathematics, Educational Theory and Practice, Social Studies, Science, Health Science and Agricultural Science - and their teacher partners also attended monthly refresher workshops in these subjects. Thus the thirty teachers trained yearly through the in-college system before the Revolution were dramatically increased through NISTEP.
It meant a huge amount of work for the teachers,

Compared to the twelve university students study-

ing abroad three years before the Revolution by 1983 there were two hundred and seventy nine studying in many different countries of the world, from Australia to Hungary, from Cuba to Canada, the Soviet Union,
Tanzania and India. Having resumed regular contributions to the regional university, the University of the

West Indies, Grenada's students were back studying there, and by 1983 had become deeply involved in leading the campaign against plans to restructure it in
such a way as to make its facilities less available to the
students of the smaller and poorer nations of the region. NISTEP gave Grenada the infrastructures to

but it also proved their mettle and stamina. NISTEP, despite its substantial logistical and budgetary problems, also raised their professional skills and pride considerably, not to mention their salaries - many of the trainee teachers who were unqualified on lower salary points, would have had their salaries raised some forty percent {40%) on passing the course. Over three hundred trainee teachers were due to graduate in October 1983.
However, something significant also progressively

build a new curriculum, to finally remove the old colonial deformity of Sir Francis Drake. the Royal Readers, Wordsworth's daffodils and the six wives of Henry VID. By offering the structured and regular
contact between the curriculum developers and class-

to the examination results from the schools,

for smce the introduction of this large investment in education, the percentage of Common Entrance

examination passes in 1982 bad grown nearly four times 1978, the last full year of the dictatorship. Comparmg the same years, the school leaving examination

room teachers, the Ministry of Education was able through NISTEP to devise and pilot new materials, with a vital input from classroom teachers themselves. both those already trained and those m the process of training. Its most ambitious curricular proJect was the writing and producing of a completely new set of Infant . S boo! readers named after one of Grenand J umor c nist and ada's great figures - the writer, trade uniO 189

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Chris Searle
federalist, T.A. Marryshow. The Marryshow Readers, co-ordinated and written under the leadership of the Trinidadian novelist and teacher, Merle Hodge, presented Grenadian children for the very first time with an environment that was Grenadian, with language patterns designed for the Grenadian context, and with texts and stories which illustrated how the working people of the country. the men and women who fish, garden, farm and produce- the true makers of their revolution, how they combined and co-operated to overcome their problems and build a new society. For the first time, English-speaking Caribbean children were seeing their own people as the protagonists of history in their own reading hooks.

Grenada Morning
munity in working in the schools, bringing their skills and cultural weight into the mainstream of the new curriculum. From forty percent (40%) of the people being semi or quasi-literate with zero adult education opportunities, the CPE brought further education classes - or Night School, as the people called it- into every village ofthe country, making education available for all adults, moving from basic literacy to '0' levels in a phased course. From an education system which made ninety percent (90%) of all Grenada's students failures, lacking in self-confidence and independent thought, there was a rapid progression towards a system which could bring out the maximum capability of each student to build their individual self-confidence, to develop the allrounded personality who would be an active constituent part of the new society. It was Jose Marti again who wrote that the new world requires the new school and to make that real for all its people was the Revolution's foremost educational priority in the "big and popular school" that forfour and a half years was this small country.

f'

A Progressive Approach to Reach Objectives

Clearly, the Ministry of Education could not move overnight to achieve its educational objectives, and advance had to be progressive, and in keeping with strict priorities. Thus, from the people paying for their secondary education the Revolution moved to free secondary education, with free uniforms and school books for the poorer families. The next step was to rapidly move towards universal secondary education. In the same way, the Ministry had to move from a multiplicity of colonial textbooks which made up an anarchic curriculum, to a common, integrated, scientifically and culturally relevant curriculum which served all Grenada's children. NISTEP meant that within three years there was a movement from only one third of the primary school teaching force being trained, to all the teachers from section being professionalised and prepared to undertake their classroom tasks with new skills and more confidence. From a total non involvement of the community in the life of the schools, the Ministry succeeded, through the Community-School Day Programme, in involving thoosands of parents and other members of the com-

190

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