"There are more educational oportunities now, but are the results the same?"
Avia Ustanny, Freelance Writer
FORTY YEARS in the life of a nation is not very long, if we should look at it from the perspective of world history. But, a survey of the change created in this period of time in the lives of individual generations will reveal significant differences.
This is especially true in a country like Jamaica where the majority of the population has experienced marked shifts in occupational patterns, material wealth and values.
Between the pre-independence generation, and others who were to come of age with the creation of the nation in 1962, the gap is much wider than mere age differences.
Forty years have been enough to take many individuals and their relatives from subsistence farming to a cosmopolitan lifestyle, professional success and even international acclaim.
Before independence, mothers and fathers, turning the soil with a hoe on rocky hillsides would scarcely dream of the things their children and grandchildren would be doing forty years later.
Their offspring have succeeded in music, sports, science and many other fields, competing successfully with other nations for international acclaim.
On the downside, the pre- and post-independence generations no longer share the same values. Today, building relationships with the people next door is no longer as important as it was back in 1962.
Forty years ago, the person in the family best able to raise a child did so, whether it was an aunt or a grandmother. Today, single moms struggle alone and many children make their home on the streets.
This week in Outlook we examine forty years in the life of a nation by entering the lives of individuals and their families.
Our interviewees include a doctor, another is a housewife and the other a communications specialist with a doctorate from Howard University.
The progress they have made, we find, is built on the values passed on by those who raised them. Their progress also represents a building on the achievements of the generation before them. So, the daughter of a pharmacist becomes a medical doctor and the child raised by a teacher becomes a communications specialist.
Our other interviewee, not gifted with the education
which the others received, is still to break the strictures of poverty which affected her own mother.
Our interviewees for the most part have fewer children than the generation which went before them. For the other differences which are evident, we leave you to judge for
yourselves.
A colonial childhood
DR. VENICE Bernard-Wright was in medical school when Jamaica gained independence. The product of a very conventional childhood, she did not leave home to take part in street dances and the parades, but she remembers feeling very much a part of the process. Would the change bring in something better than had gone before?
The Jamaica of Dr. Bernard Wright's childhood was very British in education, in social life, and, of course, politics. Her mother, Daisy Bernard who adopted her before she got married, was a pharmacist and mid-wife, and her father, the man her mother married, Ashton Bernard, was with the National Water Commission Credit Union. Dr. Bernard-Wright remembers both parents as very proper, indeed very strict but loving. In their home it was a literal practice that children were to be seen and not heard. "There could be no answering back."
Her parents did not believe in spanking, but just a look and a lecture was enough to bring tears to the eyes of their young daughter. It was church every Sunday too, rain or shine. Generally, in the community there was a greater respect for law. "Everybody knew if you broke the law you went to prison. In the streets, children were corrected by all and sundry, with the permission of parents.
"In every good house there was an Emily Post Etiquette book the principles of which children were expected to learn. They were more obedient too," recalls Dr. Bernard-Wright.
In a lot of homes music was very important. All girls were expected to learn and were sent to piano lessons.
The values being taught in these middle-class households had a positive effect. In school, grammar was very important. "In English we learnt phonics and a great stress was put on reading all the classic books by Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton and Keats."
It was summer when independence came and Venice was not allowed to attend the public events, but she followed all the news avidly. Her father, she said, was very civic minded and thought that Independence was a very wonderful idea.
Her parents were liberal enough to support her desire to become a doctor.
Getting into medical school, as a woman, had not been an easy achievement and her success was due in large part to her own persistence, and her mother's.
At Wolmer's High School, the headmistress instructed her to do her higher studies in the arts, this in spite of her expressed intention to do medicine. Venice was forced to do the sciences in evening classes, and used the passes so acquired to apply for medical school. At the University of the West Indies, the bursar suggested that she do a degree in the arts in preparation for teaching. At this point Venice said no, and her mother, who was always behind her wrote London and requested that her daughter be allowed into the medical faculty based on her passes on the sciences. London wrote to Mona, instructing them to do this and Venice became a first-year student.
In first year, she met the students from high schools around Jamaica who had spent years doing the sciences, who had subjects like zoology, botany and physics under their belts.
