- IAN ALLEN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Children live what they learn: While members of the Pentecostal Gospel Church prayed, the youngsters gathered around a Bible during a week-long vigil in Nelson Mandela Park in Half-Way Tree earlier this year. The congregation was praying and fasting for the healing of the nation.
Hartley Neita, Contributor
SEVENTY-THREE YEARS ago, Marcus Garvey had some ideas that spoke right through the years and remain poignant up until today.
His comments made at a meeting of school teachers in Kingston in October 1932 about their role in moulding the lives of the children in their charge, are of special significance now, in 2005.
He spoke at a time when opportunities for secondary education for the poor were limited. So, the vast majority of children in Jamaica then, ended their education in their mid-teens.
"Unfortunately," he began, "our education system for the common people stops at the age of 14 years and because of this we have been developing a large population of people who have had to interpret life for themselves between the age of 14 and 30. And generally, they interpret life in a bad and wrong way."
He hoped, he continued, that the day was not far distant when the good work of teachers on the minds of children up to 14 would not be spoilt by the neglect which followed between that age and manhood. "Those of us who study the social condition of the country seriously, realise that most of the crimes that are now being committed are done by young men and women between the ages of 16 and 35 people who have been thrown upon their own educational and social and cultural resources to see things in their own way."
That could have been said this morning. Could it not?
LACK OF KINDLY INFLUENCE
"The children you are moulding," he told the teachers, "live, unfortunately, in the homes of their elders and absorb something different to what you teachers have been teaching them. They are dragged down because of the lack of any kindly influence, particularly social influence, that ought to have surrounded them after leaving school at that early age of 14.
"I feel sure," he said, "that you share my view that one of the most necessary things in the life of this country is proper education. Ninety-eight per cent of the failures we have around us can be traced to a lack of proper education, because proper education includes proper social education."
The problem with Garvey's time, and which is still with us, is that in the gap between after-school and first employment, there is a lot of idle time when mischief and misbehaviour can be so attractive that the values and attitudes taught in school are destroyed. It is in this idle time they are most vulnerable to the temptations of substitutes which are adventurous. After playing dominoes until they get bored, they are drawn to the easy money that comes from crime, and from the high of that excitement seek escapism by finding a woman to rape. And the younger the female, the weaker she will be.
Garvey felt that "most of the people in our country do not really realise and know themselves because of a lack of association and it is for teachers and other mentors who know better to do everything to prevent others going along misapplying and misunderstanding the real purpose of life. In all parts of the country and particularly in lower Kingston/St. Andrew, you will find people living reckless, useless and indifferent lives and sometimes you become appalled and shocked at their behaviour.
"Teachers must therefore use the captive opportunity of the schoolroom to point the children to a higher social sphere. Outside of the regular curriculum that you are supposed to follow, point them to the course which will assist them after they leave school to seek a social level above that which they will encounter in their homes when they are no longer under the influence of school life. Inspire them to struggle and overcome the social environment which is the only one they will have an opportunity of knowing for some time after they have left your hands, so that they may interpret things from the base of a better standard of culture. Teachers can do a lot of good social work even outside the school."
Garvey then went on to point out that a boy or girl who lived in the western edge of Kingston, for instance, had a social environment which submerged the good teachings of the school and it took but a few years after that boy or girl left school for him or her to sink to the natural level of his or her neighbourhood unless the teachers, probably by some teaching, probably by a mere word, was able to inspire the individual child to strike out and seek a better social atmosphere.
That, he said, was where other countries had an advantage. There was no prejudice to prevent the poorest boy, by association, from gaining positive attitudes from a culture stronger than that in his own home. Every opportunity was given for the youngsters to walk on a different stage.
BRUTE STRENGTH
'Here in Jamaica, however, how many people of mid and upper-society ever visit the slums?" he asked. "They believe they will lose their dignity if they go there. I do not think that in a year fifty persons from mid and upper St. Andrew go there, and so the people there are left to interpret life in terms of brute strength and ignorance."
There was a time, I remember, that teachers in elementary schools took their gramophones with recordings of the music of Brahms, Schumann and other classical composers, to the school room and played them in what was called civics classes. Children heard music played by the wide range of instruments violins, 'cellos, trumpets, trombones, harps and clarinets in a commanding whole and were not limited to today's groups which consist of electronic guitars, drums and a two-octave playing pianist, with a singer repeating, "Yeah, Hey. Yeah, Hey" ad infinitum, and a background trio grunting and heaving and gyrating.
POORER CLASSES IN OTHER COUNTRIES ENABLED
Garvey referred to this when he pointed out that the poorer classes in England and other countries were enabled to attend classical and ballet recitals. The wealthy who sat in their reserved seats and the peasant who could only afford to pay a few pence could hear and see the great creative works of artistic endeavour and be inspired by hearing the beautiful and the helpful.
"But in Jamaica," he said, "when we present anything artistic, we try to make it so prohibitive that only a small set in high society can enjoy it.
"The rest," he said " can remain barbarians!"
There was a time in Jamaica when great singers such as Granville Campbell, a tenor with a remarkable voice, and Blanche Savage, a soprano whose voice was glory to hear, were invited to sing in churches in villages all over Jamaica. In rural Jamaica, there were contests between church choirs in districts. On Sundays thousands of Jamaicans went to Hope Gardens and sat on the grass and listened to the Jamaica Military Band playing works from Beethoven to Gershwin.
Folk historian Frank Gordon tells of the time when hundreds of Jamaicans stood outside the churches in downtown Kingston on the nights their choirs practised. The late Sister Ignatius of Alpha also remembered when crowds of men, women and children stayed at nights outside Alpha to hear the boys rehearsing hymns and other songs.
One of the attractions to the Garvey movement was that he staged plays, poetry readings, and musical evenings at Edelweiss Park in Cross Roads.
Perhaps we need a resurrection to cleanse the rivers of blood of our women and children.
