Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. Georgette Dorn: Good afternoon. My name is Georgette Dorn, and I'm the Chief of the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. In the name of the Library of Congress, I want to welcome Ambassador Johnson, members of the diplomatic corps and the students and other dignitaries who are here. The Library of Congress has a world-renowned collection on Jamaica and on the Caribbean, starting with the very beginning of this institution in 1800. In fact, in 1801, one of the first books on the Americas was a guidebook to Jamaica. And, as you probably all know, that in 1814 the British burned the Capitol, and also the White House, so the little fledging library that was in the Capitol burned. So in 1814, the Library bought Thomas Jefferson's collection -- 6,000 books -- and Jefferson was very interested in the entire Americas. He saw the Americas as a continuum, all the way down to Terra del Fuego. So he also in his collection had many books on the Caribbean. The Hispanic Division founded in the 1930s covers the entire Caribbean, Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula and all the areas which were once under Spain or Portugal, such as Angola, Mozambique, Macau, Goa and the Philippines, up to 1898. The Hispanic Reading Room was the first foreign area reading room in the Library of Congress, and I hope you all will come upstairs after the session and see our reading room. "The Handbook of Latin American Studies," founded in 1935 and prepared at the Hispanic Division, includes the Caribbean. It is an annual, annotated, scholarly bibliography in the humanities and social sciences, prepared in the Hispanic Division and published by the University of Texas Press. The handbook is prepared with the collaboration of 140 scholarly contributing editors and their special staff. The entire set of 64 volumes is also available online. The principal contributing editor of the handbook for the English and French Caribbean is Dr. Joan Higbee. Dr. Higbee holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and is the Hispanic Division specialist on the English and the French-speaking Caribbean. Since 2002, Dr. Higbee has organized many outstanding special events related to the Caribbean. Just to mention two, in 2007 the Prime Minister of Barbados gave a major address on CARICOM here at the Library. The event was attended by the Prime Minister of Jamaica, the Director of the Inter-American Development Bank, the Secretary General of the OAS and most of the Caribbean ambassadors representing their countries in Washington. Dr. Higbee held a major symposium on Haiti last year in 2008. I am very pleased to present to you Dr. Joan Higbee. [applause] Joan Higbee: Thank you Dr. Dorn. Distinguished guests, Mrs. Pamela Johnson, friends of the Library of Congress, it is a great pleasure to see you here today and to have the privilege of introducing our speaker, His Excellency Anthony Smith Rowe Johnson, Ambassador of Jamaica to the United States and permanent Representative of Jamaica to the Organization of American States. To begin, however, I should like to say a few words about the manner in which today's program will proceed, and to briefly describe the relationship of Ambassador Johnson's lecture to the historic collection development mission of the Library of Congress. A writer in the field of education within Jamaica and on the history of education within his country, Ambassador Johnson has also been a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies. We have asked him, therefore, to allow us to expand the usual lecture format by bringing to the question and answer session which will follow aspects of a seminar. He has graciously agreed. This means that questions will not be grouped, responses will be direct, follow-up questions are possible and discussion is encouraged. This is, after all, a lecture on education given by a senior educator. It is a valuable opportunity to focus on and to probe that subject. Strong audience engagement with the speakers at our 2008 program on the Haitian educational organization, FOCAL, has convinced us that having those who attend become a critical part of the event leads to a far deeper experience for all concerned. In this respect, I should like to extend a special welcome to the undergraduate students, master's candidates, and Ph.D. candidates here today. You are, I know, ready and willing to participate. You represent the future, and we are very glad that you are here. To all present, please take special note of the following. This event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcast on the Library's Web site and other media. The audience is encouraged to offer comments and raise questions during the formal question and answer period, but please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded and later broadcast as part of this event. By participating in the question and answer period, you are consenting to the Library's possible reproduction and transmission of your remarks. Following the lecture and discussion, you are invited to a coffee in the Hispanic Division. There you will find an exhibition of Ambassador Johnson's books, and you will have the opportunity to discuss them with him. Ambassador Johnson assumed his duties in Washington, D.C. in March 2008. A relatively new user of the Library of Congress, he is learning about the collections here while contributing to them, a wonderful synergistic relationship. In coming to the Library of Congress, Ambassador Johnson joins a community of Caribbean ambassadors and heads of government with whom this institution has long enjoyed active and cordial relationships. A recent predecessor of Ambassador Johnson, His Excellency Ambassador Richard Bernal, conducted research in the Hispanic Division and knew the collections well. Before leaving Washington, Ambassador Bernal presented to the Library, on behalf of his country, a study of the birds of Jamaica. The Library receives remarkable letters of warmth and friendship from the Caribbean. One unforgettable example is a letter written by Her Excellency Ambassador Sonja Anjani of St. Lucia on the occasion of the Bicentennial Anniversary of the Library of Congress, in the year 2000. "We are very proud to present to the Library of Congress..." wrote the Ambassador, ...an important literary landmark in the history of our island. As you may know, St. Lucia is a bilingual state: the official language is English and we also speak a French-based Creole. The government of St. Lucia, in conjunction with relevant authorities, has been assiduously attempting to give an official stature to our Creole for the last decade or so. To that end, many projects have been undertaken to translate our Creole into an official language. The gift which we are donating, the first-ever translation of the New Testament of the Bible into our native tongue, has been a highly acclaimed and successful attempt at officializing our Creole. With this in mind, we trust that you will appreciate the significance of this project and how honored St. Lucia is to be able to make such a valuable contribution to the Library of Congress. The Library is honored by such gifts and by the presence of active, engaged minds that come here to present remarkable histories of human struggle and accomplishment. These histories would not otherwise be present in this national library at such depth and with such conviction. I think now of the address on the historic formation of CARICOM and the single market and economy that Prime Minister Owen Arthur of Barbados delivered here in 2007, and of the in-depth discussion of the work of FOCAL that Prime Minister Michelle Pierre-Louis of Haiti gave in this room, in June of 2008, some three weeks before she became prime minister designate of Haiti. Through his recorded lecture today and through ten books that he has presented, Ambassador Johnson is adding valuable new material to both a modern Library and a venerable historic continuum. So let us briefly remember the beginnings of this institution and how they shape what is held here now, because the Library of Congress is built upon the shoulders of giants. With the acquisition of the library of Thomas Jefferson in 1815, the Library of Congress was reborn upon a foundation of collection diversity -- diversity of subjects, diversity of cultures, diversity of peoples and of expression. This library foundation was flexible and easily accepted expansion beyond its initial core. Today the Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. It has among its strategic goals for library services two that reflect its origins and have guided its collection development policies as millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps, manuscripts and other formats have entered its domain. As formerly stated by this institution, these goals are the following: collect and preserve the record of America's creativity and the world's knowledge, deepen the general understanding of American cultural, intellectual and social life and that of other peoples and nations. As you have learned from Dr. Dorn, Jamaica and the broader Caribbean have been and are represented with depth and breadth in the holdings of the Library of Congress. A few strategies for acquiring materials from Jamaica and the broader Caribbean have included acquisitions, trips, a standing order with a major publishing house in Jamaica, use of a blanket order dealer within the area, and an exchange agreement with the University of the West Indies. Works pertaining to Jamaica and the broader Caribbean may be found in the Library of Congress general collection, The Law Library, The Local History and Genealogy Reading Room, The Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, The Geography and Map Division, The Manuscript Division, The Microfilm Reading Room, and Prints and Photograph Division, The Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Materials pertaining to the Caribbean flow through this national library to these centers, because time has shown that this is the best way to assure their availability, security and conservation. The Hispanic Division provides collection development, research and reference services across these holdings. The Hispanic Division also has the ability to devise new means of collecting, preserving and presenting important historical documentation. Therefore, since 2002, the Hispanic Division has recorded and caused to be continuously cybercast selected programs it has organized pertaining to the English and the French Caribbean. The first program was "Reverence for Life: Hospital Albert Schweitzer and The People of Haiti." Today's lecture is part of the subsequent sequence of events, and a sequence of events is part of the historic collection development process of this institution. All of these recorded programs, from 2002 forward, have examined factors of first importance to the development of sustainable institutions and organizations critical to the well-being of residents of the Caribbean. They have all been added to the national collections, providing insight for the present and future other formats and sources do not now provide. Without exception, participants in these programs were actors within all or a part of the process they described, sometimes present at the inception and for a long time thereafter. Today's program on the history of education in Jamaica continues this approach. Ambassador Johnson is the author of ten books in which are presented individuals and processes critical to accomplishment and transformation within his country. These include children's books composed to introduce the young to values and leadership qualities manifested by, and important scientific discoveries made by, seminal figures in Jamaican history. And he has written about the history of education in Jamaica with a focus upon Kingston College. Ambassador Johnson attended Petersfield Elementary and Kingston College in Jamaica and the University of California, Los Angeles, where he obtained a B.A. in economics and an M.A. in international trade and finance. His official bio data provides the information that follows. Ambassador Johnson began his career in the media when he was an assistant farm editor at the Gleaner Company, and later news reporter producer at the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation. He was awarded the Inter-American Press Association Scholarship. In the field of education, he was the first chairman of Exit Community College, and later served as lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management Studies at the University of the West Indies from 1992 to 2008. In the political field, Ambassador Johnson served in Parliament for 27 years; Deputy Leader of the Jamaica Labour Party, Opposition Spokesman on Agriculture, Minority Leader of the Senate, Spokesman on Education, Minister of State in the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, and Senator representing the Jamaican Labour Party. He was the first Jamaican to be elected a Director of the Parliamentarians for Global Action in New York. Ambassador Johnson also served as Executive Director of the Private Sector Organization of Jamaica and Managing Director of Jampro, Ltd. He is the author of ten books and has published numerous papers and articles on economics and history. He was awarded a Senior Fulbright Fellowship in 1980 and honorary citizenship of Los Angeles. Ambassador Johnson is married to his wife Pamela for over 30 years, and they have four children: three daughters and a son. It is a great pleasure to welcome to the podium His Excellency, Anthony S. Johnson, the Ambassador of Jamaica to the United States. Ambassador Johnson. [applause] Anthony Johnson: Thank you very much Dr. Higbee, and I must say what a great honor it is to be here in the Library of Congress, this beautiful institution, which is the largest library in the world, and which has a tremendous amount of information which can help anyone, but can certainly help developing countries, particularly countries like Jamaica, which are still attempting to find their way in the world that has greeted the 21st century. Jamaica was the third island to be settled by the British, the first being St. Kitts, 1622, the second Barbados, 1625, and Jamaica was captured in 1658 by making a deal with an African Captain Lubolo that his people would be freed if he switched sides and led them against the Spanish. Lubolo agreed. The Spanish were defeated after the battle of Ocho Rios and fled to Cuba. The British then double-crossed Lubolo by allowing freedom for a few. His people killed him, fled to the mountains, and for the next 250 years the story of Jamaica is one of marronage: fleeing to the hills, trying to maintain your African traditions, raiding the plantations for guns and women, resisting attempts to lure you back into serfdom, and being free. In Jamaica there are four existing communities of Maroons representing groups who are direct descendents of the chieftains who defeated the English in battle and established their communities: Nanny in 1758 in the eastern Parish of Portland, and Kojo in 1739 in the central Parish of Clarendon. But the philosophy of marronage was evident throughout the entire society and might still exist today. The ethnic composition of the population over the past 50 years has been, as you can see on the screen, Negro, 78 percent; Negro/Caucasian, 15 percent; India, 2 percent; Negro/Indian, 1 percent; Negro/Chinese, 1 percent; Chinese, 1 percent; Caucasian, 1 percent; and Other, 1 percent. I must point out here that there is a difference -- a distinction between genotype and phenotype, and this is purely a phenotypic description, so that there are people in the same family who can have three or four different descriptions -- same mother, same father -- and one might show up being called Negro/Caucasian and the other might show up as being Negro only; in other words, using phenotype instead of genotype. It is not believed that there has been any significant change in the composition in the past century. The overwhelming visual characteristic is African, descendents of the millions of West Africans who were taken from Africa over the period 1512 to 1807, when the trade was officially abolished by a British Act of Parliament. Like many people worldwide, migration has been a constant activity and, as I said, it started with marronage, fleeing to the hills, and then subsequently, when you were able, fleeing overseas. Now if you look at the record, 1850 to 1855: the Panama Railroad, 5,000 went; 1880 to 1890, Costa Rican Railroad and the Costa Rican banana industry, 20,000. In 1885 to 1900 ,the French Canal took 89,000; 1885 to 1900, a large number settled the island of Bocas del Torro off Panama; and 1885 to 1900, a large number also went to Central America, to Honduras, to Guatemala, to Costa Rica, of course, to establish the banana industry; and then in 1906, 2,000 went to build the Ecuadorian Railroad, the "Railroad to the Sky," regarded as one of the greatest feats in railroad history, and something which is only now being discovered; 2,000 went and lost connection with Jamaica because of where Ecuador is sited. Between 1885 and 1925, some 50,000 went to Cuba. We're not too sure at 50,000. Some people say that as many as 20 percent of the Cuban population has Jamaican roots. 1904 to 1914, 10,000 went to the successful attempt to build the Panama Canal; and 1917 to 1924, 7,000 went to the United States, that would have included the parents of people like General Powell and so on; and then 1955 to1970, 60,000 went to Britain. So migration has continued, and pockets of Jamaican descendents may be found in most Latin American states, in several African countries, in almost every state in the USA and Canada, in China, Japan, India and Australia. In most cases, the reason for exodus has been the lack of economic opportunities at home, but from we started we've been running. In recent years the migration factor has created a new phenomenon called "barrel children." This refers to children whose parents live overseas and who send, regularly, cardboard barrels home. These have necessities plus money, but the lack of parental guidance has caused many teachers to claim that the "barrel children syndrome" is reducing the effectiveness of our education outcomes, because the family is not there, the guidance is not there. But is this another part of marronage, running overseas? In recent years, the economy; in 1805 Jamaica produced over 1,000,000 tons of sugar and was the largest producer in the world. It had been the major producer in the British Empire since the mid-1700s, when it was the wealthiest British colony and a significant source of capital, which drove the Industrial Revolution in that country. Intense competition from other tropical colonies, and the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and its final abolition with emancipation in 1838 dramatically reduced the production of sugar, rum, coffee, cocoa, pimento, logwood and mahogany, the former staples. The final blow was the 1846 Equalization of Sugar Duties Act, which caused an economic depression and widespread abandonment of many estates, even leading to unofficial settlements of large acreages by former workers. Interestingly, if you go to the Web site of the Ministry of Water and Housing, the claim is that there are some 900,000 persons who are living in unofficial settlements in Jamaica, and some of these settlements go back 100, 200 years. They are not regularized. The social fallout caused a scramble for land, and while land owners attempted to occupy the free holdings of the descendents of their former slaves. This came to a head in the eastern Parish of St. Thomas, and led to the Moran Bay Rebellion, in which the chief magistrate and the court house were burned. Some 2,000 blacks, it is said, were then massacred by marauding troops, and that was the lead by Deacon Paul Bogle, and also associated was national hero George William Gordon. In 1870, the economy surged with the start of the banana export trade, which soon became a worldwide industry. Except for two years, Jamaica was the world's leading exporter of bananas for every year from 1870 to 1939. This industry was not only a mass employer of labor, it allowed the small settler to earn a cash income, and resulted in hundreds of new villages and communities, some 2,000 across Jamaica, particularly in hills. And if it is from that period that a large number of our people started to gain education. Prior to that it had been the purview of the plantocracy. The Jamaican economy of 2009 is based largely on services, which account for some 62 percent. Tourism being the largest sector of the economy estimated to account for 20 percent of the GDP. The labor force of 1.2 million is dominated by agriculture and miscellaneous services -- again, it's largely tourism. Since the 1960s, Jamaica has been one of the world's largest exporters of aluminum and its ore, bauxite, which accounts for some 60 percent of merchandise exports. Tourism, 2.2 billion and remittances, 2 billion, however, are larger earnings than the mining sector, which is just 1 billion. Jamaica's current GDP of U.S. $4,100 is a middle-income level, but the second lowest in the CARICOM block, headed by the Bahamas, 18,000, and followed by Barbados, St. Kitts. And at the bottom, the poorest, lowest per capita income is Haiti, followed by Guyana, and then Jamaica. Now, Jamaica's formal education system, as you can see, has currently a high level of compliance. In the pre-primary level, 95 percent are registered in schools, some 2,180 schools, and then there are the private prep schools, to which we will return. The primary schools, which are mostly, maybe 98 percent, government-owned and where there are large numbers of students. The secondary schools are, again, largely government-owned and that 91 percent of the cohort, which is 12 to 18, are enrolled. In addition to that, there are technical high schools, but the difference between technical high schools and secondary schools are rarely blurred. Finally, in tertiary, we have some 40,000. I estimate 40,000, but it is 29 percent of the cohort which, the age cohort, which is 18 to 24 in the case of the primary, of the tertiary schools. Now the expenditure of the government per capita is instructive. You will notice that Jamaica at $323, Trinidad $817 per capita, Barbados, $1,871 per capita -- so Barbados is spending almost 6 times as much on education as Jamaica on primary education. Secondary education and tertiary education is the same. I might say the Barbadians say that everyone in Barbados up to the level of the Ph.D. can gain free education. Barbados is one of the few countries in the world which can claim that. But if you look at the income per capita -- the "Y" means income -- of the countries, not to do with education, you will see where Jamaica, at this time, when this was done in '05, our per capita income was 3,500. Trinidad and Tobago was 8,100 and Barbados, 14,000. As I said, Barbados is now at 18,000 and both Barbados and Trinidad are now graduated into being called developed countries whereas we have stayed as a middle-income country. However, if you look at the literacy levels, they are not that different: Jamaica 86 percent, Trinidad 93 percent and Barbados 97 percent. We then look at the results of the grade 11 examinations. That is the Caribbean Exam Council, the CXC, which you take when you get to be age 16, 17 and that is what allows you to graduate from the school. Now we start off with the cohort, which is 12 to 18 or 12 to 17. In Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados you can see, at 22,000 in Trinidad; they're about half the size of Jamaica, we have about 40,000. The number sitting is fairly reasonable for Trinidad: 20,000 out of their cohort of 22,000. In our case it is just a little over 50 percent. So the percentage of the cohort causes a problem. It's just 56 percent. The number passing; in Trinidad, 9,000 and in Jamaica 12,000. But the percentage of the cohort -- this is the English language -- is only 31 percent. In Trinidad it is 43 percent, so it's still not as high as we would want it to be. In mathematics, the same pattern, where we end up with the number that passes being 9,500 in math in Trinidad, and 2,400 in Jamaica. So in Jamaica we are getting about a third of the passes which Trinidad get even though they have twice the population. And the percentage of the cohort passing in Trinidad is 41 percent. In Jamaica it is 20 percent. Now that is not acceptable at all, even though we have over 90 percent of the cohort in schools; and that, in fact, is regarded as the major challenge. Now one of the interventions that has been done is to look at the readiness of the children for education when they start. And this is a controversial issue, looking at children when they are five, six and seven, and seeing how many subjects -- when they are barely learning to read and write, how ready are they for learning? That is to say, the extent to which they understand that words spoken relate to what is written, and that when you write five you mean five, and six, and so on. We've found that -- it was very interesting, a large number of people, of children, were only competent in one or two subjects. Four thousand were not competent in reading at all, reading or writing or adding. But we would want everyone to be at a level of at least four subjects when they start. So what they are now saying is that, because 40 percent are only competent in two or less, it means that as they go up through the stream, they are not picking up the learning, even though they are sitting in the classes. And that is the great area of concern with Jamaica at this present time. How do you get children who go to school coming out of the system empowered, understanding, and doing other than simply writing and regurgitating what has been passed through? Now from the above, I draw the following conclusions. Among the pre-tertiary age population, over 90 percent are enrolled in schools. Two, the readiness inventory shows that almost 40 percent of the students entering the system at age five to six were unprepared for the learning process. After year one, they were competent in only one -- in only two or less subjects. Subsequent studies show that these students, by and large, continue to underperform academically up to the time they leave the school system. Point four, there are 196 proprietary schools with 15,800 students who are among the best in the world, and continue to excel through to the tertiary level. Now that is not just talk. We come up here to the Scripps Howard Spelling Bee contest. We've won it once. We've come third more than once, and we usually end up in the top 20 percent, and that is a fantastic thing. We're up there with the Americans and Japanese, the Koreans, and those are the people who do well. And these students come, most of them, from our proprietary schools. We're happy with that, but we're not happy at the other end, that we are passing through another level. They don't go to the prep schools. Prep schools are expensive private schools. They go to the government schools, the primary schools, and a large cohort there is not coming through. When compared to the CARICOM states, Jamaica's public budget spends at the same level of the equivalent GDP per capita as other leading states, but this is a small fraction of the welfare countries; as you saw, 1,800 for Barbados, 300 for Jamaica. The levels of measured literacy would suggest that there is a very minor problem in comprehension among the population. This is not so. Seven: the Barbadian level of literacy, at close to 100 percent, is a goal which Jamaica has set itself, but we have not yet achieved it. We are still 80, 85 percent. The level of passes in the secondary school final results shows Jamaica producing 31 percent of the total age cohort with passes in English language and 20 percent in mathematics. Other structural features: the system is driven by the public sector, and ensures that any child whose guardians are desirous can be educated up to grade 11, free of cost. Two: over 80 percent of the teachers are either certified, trained teachers or are trained graduates. When we get through the history, we'll see there was a period when a school with 400 or 500 only had one trained teacher for the entire island. That was a pattern. Seventy percent of the teachers are trained, and 70 percent are female. Over 75 percent of our tertiary students also are now female. In some faculties over 80 percent are female. I don't think anybody has a problem with the high level of attendance of the ladies. We are concerned about the fact that if 80 percent are female it means 20 percent are male, and the question: where are the men? At the high school level, an average of 40 percent -- failing, we'll call it that. The World Bank has reported that 80 percent of the Jamaican graduates from local institutions -- well, at least from the University of West Indies -- leave Jamaica within three years of graduation. Since this is a significant segment of the persons who are competent in English and mathematics, it has caused serious concern. Since if we're not getting that number passing, and the best ones, 80 percent of them leave within three years -- and of course its economic opportunity, but the rest of the world doesn't behave that way, so I wonder, the marronage, if that really isn't what is in us. So we now look at the education system, and we can identify four periods of growth. Number one: the period of official capture. It tells you what's happening there. Number two: the denomination operated systems. That's Christian denominations, which from 1834 legally were allowed to operate schools, and then to 1879 when the Jamaica Schools Commission was established and the government started to have a policy. There was no policy on education prior to that. The most important thing that happened then was in 1835, the Mico Trust opening a training college for teachers. After 1879, the government took control of primary school education, started to assist secondary schools, and after 1853, when we gained ministerial government, the government started to put more money into the secondary schools and to expand them. We also, in that period, got tertiary education going with the 1948 start of the University College of the West Indies. The slavery period, 1512 to 1834: under the Spanish, marronage became established, and the system of resistance became entrenched. Marronage involved escape, recapture, more insolence, refusal to work, sabotage, providing deliberately false information, malingering, poisoning and setting fires; not a pretty picture. It was independently established throughout the Caribbean in direct proportion to the size of the territory. At one end of the continuum, in the three Guianas, African communities escaped into the vast, equatorial forest and established their own societies, almost totally isolated from European British Guiana, French Guiana or Dutch Guiana. At the other end of the continuum would be the smaller territories such as Barbados and St. Kitts, where escape was difficult, and industrial discipline could be maintained. For most of the islands, such as Jamaica, there was a constant struggle between the planters and their captives. The chroniclers of the period regarded the African population as totally uneducated, and I would think that most of you, perhaps, believe that. However, it is important to state that many of the West Africans came from societies in which they had a written script, especially if they were Muslims. Bryan Edwards, author and plantation owner from West Midland, wrote in 1798: "Besides this, I had another Mandingo servant who could write, with great beauty and exactness, the Arabic alphabet. The advantage of a few of these people of being able to read and write is a circumstance of which the Mandingos pride themselves." Now Edwards is saying that intellectual capacity among his slaves was regarded as a point of pride. So it's not true that our people didn't care about reading, writing and studying, but the system told them not to. Edwards, a friend of Lord Byron, goes further. "They display such gentleness and discipline as would seem the result of early education and discipline. Were it not that generally speaking," and he goes back to his thing now, "they are more prone to theft than that of any other African tribe..." So, giveth with the right hand, you make certain you take it back with the left hand. Professor Errol Miller, perhaps Jamaica's most eminent educator, points out that, until 1833 public education in Britain and its colonies was the province of the family and the church. The world-famous twelve British public schools were public only in the sense that they were open to the public, meaning very wealthy and well-connected public. It wasn't the average man, he had to get it at his mother's breast. Education would therefore have been the province of the parents. Edward Long, another planter, Jamaican planter, writing in 1774, tells us that the planters had a system of ensuring that their plantations never had a critical mix of any one group, to prevent plotting. He lists the Africans as first a mixture of Arabs and Moors, then the Senaga, the Jaloffs, the Phulis, and the Mandingo blacks. Then, different districts he calls the Grain Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast, "All of these occupied by petty Negro states." Now this is amazing. In 1774, this English Negro hater recognized that the Africans had states. States! Yet, somewhere down the line, other historians started referring to them as purely tribes, deliberately reducing and devaluing the social structure of the people. Long was no Negro lover. His Africans fought him and he fought them. So he refers to the Jaloffs as "A barbarous race, hardened in idolatry, wallowing in human blood, cannibals, drunkards, practicing lewdness, oppression and fraud." So even though he scripts in that they have states, which are organized institutions with laws, rules and being managed in a logical manner, he then steps back to the normal thing of saying that they only were involved in -- the drunkards, and so on. Critically, the system deliberately held as fact that everything African was wrong and everything European was right. Forced Europeanization also meant self-depreciation, and was therefore resisted by all means. The unnatural state labor arrangement, however, had other serious negative outcomes. There was a reduced cooperation among the Africans themselves, and this interfered with the process of family formation. Bearing in mind that family education was the only education, not only in Jamaica but across the world, that held until the 1833, 1834 British legislation, which brought education into the public domain. The plantation socialization, however, kept the women as an unofficial harem for the white overseers and attorneys, and the children were the property of and responsibility of the owner, subject to removal or sale without notice. Male disempowerment led to the removal of the paternal link in the family structure. The female-headed household has continued in modern society. Other important features were that in Jamaica during this period the Jamaican Creole language was established, a powerful tool of expression described by several scholars as "A true language of restructured English words with West African grammatical construction." Professor Devonish, the U.A. linguistic Department Chair has said, "Modern day African European Creole languages are distinct enough from the particular sources of the bulk of their vocabulary to be considered as separate languages. Known as Jamaican patois or Creole, it is understood and spoken by all persons born and raised in Jamaica or of Jamaican parentage up to the sixth generation." Interestingly, in London, they now appoint people who are interpreters of Jamaican language in the courts, and anybody who wants a job, if you are a Jamaican, you can go over there and earn something. The Christian Church; the role of the church has played has been crucial in every aspect of Jamaican life to the present day. First, for over 100 years it was the only area of organized social activity for the black population. Second, it was also the only arena in which the rulers of the society accepted that there was some level of common humanity with the labor force. Third, the Sunday schools were the only arena of teaching literacy for the Africans and, fourth, the reading of the Holy Bible gave them hope. To the present day, Jamaicans are well-versed in the Old Testament stories of Moses leading the slaves out of Egypt, and the talk of a loving God who punishes the powerful and supports the weak. Fifth and finally, the churches were the seat of local government until 1884. The Anglican Rector was the manager of the vestry, which was both the church's managing committee as well as the agent of local government in that jurisdiction, the parish. The most important element was that the Sunday schools were, for 3 1/2 centuries, the only agent of mass education in Jamaica. In 1754, the Moravian Church from Germany sent missionaries to Jamaica to convert the African population. They started a primary school at Bethlehem in the West, and later a teacher training college at Fairfield. The teacher training college only closed about 1900, some years after the Mico. They suffered serious persecution, but they demonstrated that Africans could be good scholars, Christians, employees and even evangelists. In 1776, a group of 2000 freed Africans arrived from the United States with their former British masters. On the promise of freedom, they had fought against the American patriots in the War of Independence. On this occasion, unlike with Juan Lubolo in 1658, the British not only lost, but they kept the bargain; that is, they freed their slaves. Two of them were black Baptist leaders: George Leile and Moses Baker. They established the Baptist Church in Jamaica, which became and continues to be the largest denomination in Jamaica. In 1889, the Reverend Dr. Thomas Coke of the Methodist sect in Britain came to Jamaica with the powerful voice of his church leader, John Wesley, thundering against "That foul vice," as he termed slavery. Coke cofounded Methodism in Jamaica and the West Indies. The Methodist, Baptist and Moravians established the elementary school system in Jamaica among the freed slaves before emancipation -- because some slaves did manage to gain freedom before -- and rapidly expanded after emancipation in 1838. On Sundays, their churches overflowed with Africans on their free day. The term Sunday school for them was not merely a religious rite, but their only opportunity to learn to read and write. The established church, the Anglicans, termed Episcopalians in the United States, was forced to follow suit, and soon opened a few elementary schools in Kingston in the early 19th century for free Africans as well as the children of poor whites. The plantocracy sent their children to school in Britain -- the mother country, as they termed it -- or they had a private governess in the home. In 1832, after the Baptist War, a powerful anti-black movement, the Colonial Church Union, was led by the rector of the Ocho Rios Episcopal Church, the Reverend J. W. Bridges. However -- okay, in 1831, the Baptist War broke out in Jamaica. Baptist Deacon Samuel Sharpe, a free, educated black, arranged a massive system of resistance across the north coast, starting on Kensington Estates. Over 50 estates were burned by blacks tired of 300 years of oppression. In retaliation, the whites burned down two dozen Baptist and Methodist chapels, and inquiry found that most of the leaders of the rebellion were educated class leaders of these churches. Planter literature had warned against educating blacks, since they had been sabotaging the system over the years and, given greater knowledge, would not express gratitude but outrage. It was in this atmosphere that Thomas Fowell Buxton moved for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the House of Commons in 1832. The Right Excellent Samuel Sharpe, Order of Jamaica, was made a national hero by Jamaica after independence in 1962. So, we now move to the period of early freedom. After abolition of slavery the Negro Education Act was passed with the sum of 20,000 pounds for schools in the colonies. In the same year, 20,000 pounds was also passed for the public school system in Britain, the first. It was the first grant for English public schools. In both cases, the funds were for primary schools to be operated by the denominations. It is an anomaly worth noting that for the mass of children in the West Indies, education was restricted to those under the age of seven, because you entered the labor force at seven, and so -- [laughter] amazing -- because children over seven were an official -- okay. The apprenticeship system ended in 1838, and the glorious story of the Mico Institution takes over the role of education pioneer in the English-speaking Caribbean. From an abandoned 1670 will of a former London trader, Samuel Mico, abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton arranged a trust with funds to start schools among the freed Africans and their descendents in the colonies in 1835. With heavy opposition from the local whites, an Irish genius, Episcopal Rector John McCammon Trew established the Mico System and by 1836, just one year, he established 16 schools in 10 Jamaican parishes and a training college in Kingston. He then toured the Caribbean and established schools in Antigua, Bahamas, British Guiana, St. Vincent, Dominica and Montserrat, establishing almost 200 schools with over 3,000 students. In all cases, the schools were operated by the churches, the denominations. They were all denominational schools, viewed with hostility and/or curiosity by the local plantocracy. However, it was the start of the glorious education system of the Caribbean, which has produced two Nobel laureates and professors of most leading institutions in Europe and North America. The school system expanded rapidly across Jamaica. A single trained each teacher with a cadre of bright, past pupils as class teachers would bring formal education to the towns and villages. The British Negro Education Act ended in 1841, and after this the churches were on their own. Expansion slowed, but that single teacher, poor but proud, often the only literate person in the district, carried on. The Mico Trust concentrated on its great colleges in Kingston and St. John's, Antigua. Antigua was closed in 1899. Kingston continues. The pupil teachers were unpaid, but the headmaster coached them in the afternoons. Their sole aim was to qualify for entrance to the Mico, the only institution of post-primary education for a population approaching 1 million. A mere 20 to 30 spaces were available each year. Pupil teachers would move into the clerical trades, the police force, pharmacy and what was called the subordinate staff of the government services. In 1885, the Anglican education giant Archbishop Enos Nuttall teamed with a Methodist Reverend T. B. Butcher to start Shortwood Teachers Training College and pioneer the training of female teachers in Jamaica. Mico had been -- indeed, up until 1958, Mico was a male-only institution. Today, it is 95 percent female. The effect of this motivation was massive. For the past 30 years, teachers have provided over 80 percent of the teaching force in modern Jamaica. The Moravians had started Bethlehem Women's Teachers College in Saint Elizabeth, but it was hobbled by insufficient resources. Today it is offering university degrees. Since independence, teacher training has been offered at Jamaica's three universities, its dozen community colleges and its seven specialist teacher training colleges. In keeping with tradition, the main religious denominations have all been involved. The American-based Seventh-day Adventists, newcomers to the field, started in 1917 at Riversdale, St. Catherine, has grown to become Jamaica's third university and the second-largest Christian denomination. The following table shows the line-up among institutions reporting for getting grants from the Negro Education Grant. Interestingly, you will see that the Baptists only were able to get two teachers with six schools with 3,000 parents. Now notice, this is 1838. It is the Baptists that brought the system down with the war in 1832, Christmas, and they were being punished for it. Because here we have the Church of England with the very largest number, 34,226 teachers. They hadn't been involved in education except for maybe a dozen or so very small schools in Kingston. It had been the Baptists and the Methodists, which are here called Wesleyans. Well, the Methodists didn't get so much punishment. They are at 11,445, and the Presbyterians with a thousand were relatively newcomers. The Moravians, strong, with 18 schools, 4,120. Shirley Gordon, who provides these figures, says that these statistics are hardly to be taken as reflective of education effort. What it is reflective of is where the government was proposing to put the money. In 1841, a worldwide economic recession had set back the system, and the British grant was ended, but the churches pressed on. In 1883, the Royal Commission would report that education was expanding rapidly despite the lack of official resources between 1841. In spite of the Moran Bay rebellion of 1865, when the black small holders of an eastern parish St. Thomas showed that the resistance which had smoldered could boil over, education had been the fastest rising expenditure of the government as follows, and Deacon Paul Bogel of the free Baptist Church was the leader of the rebellion in St. Thomas. He is now the Right Honorable Deacon Bogel, national hero of Jamaica. Now look at the average expenditure of funds over this period. In 1862 to 1866 it was 3,700 pounds. In 1867 to 1871, it fell to 720 pounds. In 1872 to 1876, 19,000 pounds, it went up; and 1877 to 1881, to 23,400 pounds. So, if you will see what has happened over the period it has moved from the 1860s 3,700 pounds -- this is not per capita, this is a gross, and the "L" there is pounds, a British denomination, which those of you who are old enough like me will remember a pound; two dollars to a pound. In 1872, it recovered, and was -- up to the 1870s it was doing 23,000 pounds. So there was growth over the period in the educational expansion. After Moran Bay, in 1879, the Jamaican Schools Commission was established to make annual reports and to develop the high school system. Its director, the director of education and his inspectors, soon became among the most important civil servants in Jamaica. The inspectors soon became Mico graduates, but only one Jamaican, the late Reginald Murray, actually became director of education, which he gained in the 1950s. The result of all of this was that literacy started to improve, and we see where, in 1861, 50,000 could read and write, 68,000 could read only, giving a total of 119,000, which is 31 percent of the cohort above five years. And at that time 33,000 children were in school. Right up to 1881 when you are finding 115,000 who could read and write -- and the population above 45 percent were gaining literacy as far back as 1881, pretty close -- and the number of children in school was 67,000. So there was tremendous growth, doubling between the 1860s and the 1880s. The glory days were, in fact, ahead, as Jamaica introduced the world to bananas in 1870. I said that before. We now look at secondary education. Elementary schooling ceased at age 14 and so the need for secondary schools arose. The black middle class was produced by the Mico Training College, which took the cream of the secondary schools, albeit only 30 per annum. This single school was the sole source of further education for the entire black population until the early 20th century when they were admitted to exclusive high schools; mostly whites and high browns being admitted before. Secondary schools originated from a totally different stream: the traditional planter's trust. These were originally elementary schools, but after the 1879 reforms became secondary schools. The first was the will of 1690 by a Barbadian Charles Drax, who came to Jamaica and died there. Its fruit is the famous Jamaica College. In the small town of Lucea, there would be the Ruseas free school from an 18th-century trust of Martin Rusea, a French refugee. Savanna-la-mar, in 1711 had the will of Thomas Manning to form Manning's school. 1729, the Wolmer's Trust by a Kingston goldsmith established Kingston's first, and for many years, Jamaica's largest secondary school, Wolmer's. Peter Beckford's bequest of 1735 to form Beckford and Smith's High School, now St. Jago High School, in the capital, Spanish Town. The Vere Trust in mid-island, which today is inherited by Vere Technical High, a sports champion school. Munro and Dickinson Trust formed Munro and Hampton Schools, continuing as a city on a hill in the West. The Titchfield Trust in the 19th century formed the Titchfield School. In 1850, a group of expelled Colombian Jesuits took refuge in Kingston and started St. George's High School, which is a school that has produced the great Monsignor Wilson. As you have heard of him, by age 23 he had three Ph.D.'s, could speak seven languages and was the first black Monsignor in Jamaica. And the other being Percival William Gibson, the first black bishop of the Anglican Church in the 20th century. Those came out of St. George's College. Calabar High School was founded by the British Baptist Reverend Price in 1912 as an expansion of Calabar Theological College, which was established by the Baptist at Calabar in Trelawny, way back in 1850. I had a difficulty as to whether I should say tertiary started with the 1850, because it was one single institution, and it didn't really -- it didn't become a national movement, but it did start, it was a tertiary institution. More of that. Canon Percival Gibson, reputedly the first black graduate of the Jamaica Theological College, founded Kingston College in 1925, which he proudly proclaimed, "Would use as its capital, character." By 1950 it was the largest secondary school in the West Indies with 850 students. By 1970, it had 2,200 students and had justified Gibson's boast. In 1930, an elementary school graduate, Wesley Powell started Excelsior High School, which became the Caribbean's first total complex. Now owned by the Methodists, it has some 5,000 students: kindergarten, primary, the great Excelsior High School and the Excelsior Community College which, among other things, pioneered the training of nurses outside a hospital. One of Mr. Powell's great gifts; he looked at it and said "A nurse doesn't need to be in a hospital except for clinicals," and this was controversial but now everybody wants to get a nurse from Excel. The first secondary school built by the government was Cornwell College in 1895, but a system of giving annual grants to approved trust schools followed that experiment. The expansion of secondary training was largely through capital grants to the traditional secondary schools, some of which I have just outlined, which allowed for very limited expansion into the 20th century. Into the 20th century, only about 5 percent of the cohort was getting into secondary school. In 1953, Jamaica received a new constitution with ministerial responsibility, and Edwin Allen became the first Minister of Education. A Michael gold medalist who had gained an external B.A. from London University, he proclaimed a policy that each major community should have a secondary school as an extension of the elementary school. For this he was pilloried and denounced as wanting to move against the traditional high schools and water down their great and glorious heritage. For elementary schools, all funding was provided by the government. For denominational schools, the boards were named by the church with government representatives. For government schools, the boards were named by the member of the House of Representatives. What happened? That means assistance to education began to be seen as a political benefit, and that is where we really get the growth. In 1959, Allen's successor, Florizel Glasspole, decreed that 70 percent of the secondary school entrants should be from primary schools. Both men, Allen and Glasspole, were accused of attempting to dilute the quality of Jamaica's high schools. After independence, with Allen, again, as Minister, in 1970 the World Bank made its first education loan in the Western Hemisphere to Jamaica for building 60 junior secondary schools. In a stroke, secondary level education was tripled and, as you see, it's now gone up to 95 percent of the cohort is getting secondary training. After independence in '62 the government took over control of all elementary schools, and the Minister of Education named all boards. The denominational system was given the remnant benefit of naming the chairman of the board of those schools to which they had titles to the properties. Elementary schooling had no fees, but secondary schools remained, although they covered less than 20 percent of the total required costs. In 2008, after much debate, the government abolished school fees at both primary and secondary levels. Jamaica was the last CARICOM state to provide this facility. Harsh economic reality had forced almost all private secondary schools to be sold to the government, but the prep schools, with their strong class bias, have remained as a bulwark of the educational system. Most are owned by the church. Tertiary; tertiary training began at Calabar in the 1840s. It later moved to Kingston and added secondary training in 1912, the first to have a bias towards black children. In 1890, the Anglicans started theological training at Church Theological College, later St. Peter's College. The Methodists had pioneered in 1885 at York Castle in St. Anne. It closed in the depression of 1889, but they reopened at Canewood in the early 20th century. The Presbyterian Theological College was established at 82 Duke Street in the late 19th century, and renamed St. Colme's and removed to Lockett Avenue. In 1948 the colonial government answered a call from the region's intellectuals, and London University opened a University College of the West Indies at Mona in Jamaica, with a class of 45 medical students. As affiliates of the University of London, similar colleges were opened at Makarare, in Tanganyika, Legon in Gold Coast and Ibadan in Nigeria. After independence in 1962, UCWI gained its own charter as the University of the West Indies. They have all been highly successful and are now autonomous universities in their own right. UA has a student population of some 30,000 and resident campi in Trinidad and Barbados, with smaller facilities in ten other member states of the Caribbean community from the Bahamas right down to Grenada. It may be said to have started Caribbean integration process, and certainly started modern training in the wider academic sphere that is apart from theology. Within 50 years, nine of its alumni have been prime ministers of various states. The Protestant theological college churches have merged and formed Union Theological Seminary, an affiliate of the UWI. Prior to that, the Anglicans had established a link with Durham University, which provided a constant, if limited, number of Bachelors of Divinity from 1890. Jamaica, however, also has its own university: the government owned University of Technology, with over 10,000 registered students and seven teachers colleges. All except the College of Arts, Science and Education of Portland were started by the churches. The Seventh-day Adventists had established Northern Caribbean University in Mandeville. Modern technology permits overseas institutions to offer courses in Jamaica at economic costs. The University Council of Jamaica established in the 1980s to manage that process and by 2008 some 40 tertiary overseas institutions, from the University of Manchester in Britain to the various universities in New Orleans in United States, are registered to offer courses in Jamaica. The vast majority are from the United States. This has allowed 29 percent of the cohort, 18 to 24, to be registered at the tertiary level. The major negative is the finding that 80 percent migrate within two years, within three years. However, the process of nation-building is to produce labor skills which can use local resources, including labor, to produce goods and services, and this remains a challenge. Early childhood: the strong gap between performance of students who attended primary as against proprietary schools has been identified as failure at the earliest level. Jamaica is now in the process of upgrading and establishing 2,000 kindergarten schools as part of the public system. It was found that the real difference was not the pedagogy at the 6 to 11 age level but, rather, at the 3- to 5-year age level. The current debate concerns shifting resources from the tertiary to the kindergarten level. In an economy which has not grown significantly since 1990, this suggests higher fees at the tertiary level, or a larger budget deficit. So that is the challenge that's facing us. So I summarize -- I apologize for having been so long. Number one, the history of Jamaica's education is a critical part of the history of the population. Two, the Christian churches have played a heroic role in the development of this sector and their influence continues to this day. Three, the attitude of marronage has become one of the basic features of the Jamaican culture. It stresses resistance to organized processes and rejection of the norms and teachings of the ruling class. This attitude is believed to be implicated in many antisocial attitudes expressed by the Afro descendents, which have created serious problems for the normal processes of socialization needed in a modern society. Four, the public sector has taken almost total control of the educational sector in Jamaica after years of control by the church. This has coincided with a reduction of inspired teaching, rigid discipline and strong will to learn exhibited by earlier generations. It is not easy to determine if this is a result of the expansion of the education from an elite corps to the total population, or a reduction of the religious-inspired dedication of earlier generations. Five, the emergence and persistence of a second language in Jamaica, Creole, is blamed for an inability of a significant percentage of the population to absorb formal study of the English language. However, all Jamaicans do understand formal English and object strongly to any suggestion that they speak anything except English. Six, the low level of public expenditure per capita on education is accepted as a major reason for Jamaica's under-performance in several of the mandated school-leaving Caribbean exams. Seven, a number of critical questions emerge from this analysis. Is the current formal education curriculum adequate to produce the 20th century attitudes and skills required for success? Many public commentators blame the high level of crime and violence in Jamaica and other African descended populations on attitudes developed in society during the 300 years of official capture. Others say this is a cop-out, and as proof, point to the millions of brilliant black professionals and ordinary [unintelligible] working-class men and women who have succeeded while growing up in exactly the same circumstances. No, I do not have the answer. Number eight, since 1834, the emphasis has shifted from elementary, to secondary, and then tertiary. The current trend is to early childhood education. While this is suggested by several academicians, it has rarely been tried elsewhere. Thank you. [applause] Joan Higbee: I would just like to say right now, thank you so much Ambassador for your valuable contribution. It was so gracious of you to come today. Ms. Subet [spelled phonetically]: Ambassador, I would like to know, since Jamaica has produced the largest percentage of the Rhodes Scholarship to London what is the success that brought that level percentage of the Rhodes Scholars from Jamaica? Anthony Johnson: Okay, well, first of all, the Rhodes Scholar is not purely an academic exercise. It speaks to people who have exhibited leadership capacities, and athletic or some sort of skill outside of the classroom as well as within the classroom. Now the Rhodes Scholarship started to be given in Jamaica earlier than the other territories in the Caribbean, and it was only after independence that a number of other territories became adequate, eligible. Indeed, there's a big issue about women Rhodes Scholars, which we now have, and we didn't have that. That was started in Jamaica. So we seem to have had a jump on the rest of the region, and I think that it is the fact that we started getting at first. I might say that Jamaicans did make representations to the Rhodes authorities in London to allow it to be expanded through the region so that we are all benefiting at this time. Miss Subet: Thank you Ambassador. My name is Ms. Subet and I'm a staff member of the Library of Congress. Heequee [spelled phonetically]: Ambassador, it's a pleasure to see you here. I'm from Haiti myself and my name is Heequee. I have a question. You mentioned that in Jamaica you have about 80 percent of your post-secondary graduates who leave the country within three years after having graduated. Does that show that there is a greater economic problem? Does Jamaica try to diversify its economy in such a way that it can retain its graduates so they can help the economy expand? Is there any kind of effort made to get foreign investment inside the country that is more conducive to these people's capacities, educated citizens capacity, so they can stay in the country? Because, I mean -- Anthony Johnson: Thank you. I think I make the point that the migration that's happening now is a migration that started back 200 years ago, that we are a migrant people. It is our response. Other people have different responses to challenge, and our response is to migrate, and so large numbers do migrate, which they always have. What is happening now -- at that time we weren't putting any money in education so if they left the capital it wasn't the capital [unintelligible]. Now that we are putting the money in, we need it. Furthermore, Jamaica used to be producing merchandise. It was 80 percent a merchandise economy. It is now a service economy, and for services you require a trained labor force or a high-quality labor force to provide high-quality services. So it now becomes far more of a difficulty. Now, in an era of globalization, free trade and free movement, migration tends to increase, not decrease, and we happen to be within an hour flying time of the richest country in the world, and the country which has the greatest opportunity, now turns out, for ascendance of African-Americans. So I don't see us being able to stop the level of people who will leave. What it really means is that we will have to continue to do, which we also have, is to attract large numbers of people from other parts of the world who come into Jamaica and make a contribution. So we have large numbers of Chinese, Lebanese, other people coming in. We have people from the United States and Britain who come to live in Jamaica and to work with us, and continually make a very significant contribution. So it's a two-way flow, and we don't -- we worry about the migration, but there isn't anything that we can do. No government could ever think in terms of stopping people from migrating. It's not on the cards. Emmanuelle Busheri [spelled phonetically]: Good afternoon. My name is Emmanuelle Busheri. Please, regarding the barrel syndrome; migration, for me personally, since I migrated from Haiti to the U.S. It is a natural fact: when people are hungry like birds or animals, they migrate where they have a fertile ground. The barrel syndrome, to me, is different than the marronage as you explain it. Can we say that the barrel syndrome is the fact that we come here and we look back, but the marronage was we go and hide and come back at night as in insurgents. Anthony Johnson: The barrel syndrome is -- I'm grateful for the question. It's something that we had not recognized. So, the real big migration started in the middle 1950s to Britain, and what happens is that when you -- when a migrant of limited education goes into a new setting, they can't -- they've already started a family in the Caribbean. They can't take the children over, because they themselves don't know where they're going to sleep. So you settle down, but you have to send back -- even if it means borrowing money, you have to send back, because you know those children are there. And, eventually, maybe usually in a period of 10 to 20 years, you send for the children. Now it has several problems, one of which is that large numbers of those children have a view that Jamaica is not too relevant for them because they are going to live in New York or Miami. Some of them, they tell the teachers, "I can't work to pass any exam here because when I go there I have to take over new exams," and so you are having another resistance right there in the classroom. And, I mean, there is truth to it in the sense that they do come up ,and they do do well. The fact of a barrel coming back and goodies coming out of it very often creates a syndrome, a Santa Claus syndrome, that "Here's a barrel that is bringing stuff." You don't see the effort. You don't see the work. You don't know the sacrifices that your mother is making or your uncle or whoever it is that is sending back that barrel. You think it's something that's just coming out of the sky, so you're not relating benefit to performance and work, and that is all a part of it. Of course, there's a totally negative side where the children aren't getting the guidance. We now have a new thing throughout the Caribbean of children-headed households. This is totally ridiculous. Children as young as 12 or 11 are in charge of the household, because when the migrant left -- the mother usually -- she didn't have anyone, so she left the children to look after the other, the littler ones, and the barrel will come every two months, and the money through the remittance. Now it's great for the elder child who's getting some sort of experience in management and so on, but the younger ones haven't got any socialization. So we are studying this issue of barrel children. We thought it was a Jamaican phenomenon, but I've seen papers that it's right through the Caribbean. Shakyma Winston [spelled phonetically]: Hi Ambassador. My name is Shakyma Winston. I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Howard. This is actually a follow-up question to the barrel syndrome, and you covered some of it, but my question is more so to gender. Within your stats, you proved that it seems as if the females give a little bit more back as part education is concerned, and progress a little bit rather more so than the males. So within the barrel syndrome, is it that men, per se, are being left more so than the females, or is it that the women are taking on a different role? Anthony Johnson: Okay, thank you, ma'am. The African-descended community in the western world has generally had a problem with the marriage institution, and large numbers of our children do not have a live-in father. In the case of Jamaica, it still continues that somewhere about 80 percent of the children are born outside of wedlock. And it's not merely Christian wedlock or any kind of wedlock at all, it's a large number of the households are headed by a woman who does not have a stable partner. And this means that for the majority of the people who migrate, it is women who have left the children behind, because there was no man in the first place. This is a tremendous challenge and a tremendous problem, because it comes at a time where, since the 1970s, the Western world itself is running against marriage and, you know, single, stable unions. But it seems to me that they have already established the relationship of the father to his children. So whether you are divorced or not, you have to take care of your children. I mean, you're a man. You have children. The courts in any Western country will hold you very, very seriously. You can go to jail if you miss paying your payments to the children. In the Caribbean, certainly in Jamaica, this is not so. It's almost a part of the culture that the woman really takes care, and indeed there are Caribbean women who refuse to take any money or anything at all from the man. "I am through with you, and I don't want you to have anything at all to do with me, my children or whatever." But the role of the male, therefore -- and Professor Miller, to whom I refer constantly and who reviewed this paper for me before I wrote it -- says that the marginalization of the Jamaican male is one of the greatest problems that we face; that men are not standing up to their responsibility. And he suggests that in many respects the symptom is de-motivating male participation. So that is a big social issue and it's not just Jamaica apparently. David Barnes: Thank you, Ambassador, for coming today and sharing with us. My name is David Barnes and I'm a staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and also the President of the Congressional Caribbean Staff Association. You spoke extensively about the church's role in education in Jamaica and, as a Seventh-day Adventist myself who attended Adventist colleges here in the states, a lot of students from Northern Caribbean University attend Adventist schools in the states -- say, Oakwood College or Andrews University -- and also professors from those universities teach also at Northern Caribbean University. So they provide a, you know, formal educational exchange, but I think, more importantly, a cultural educational exchange. And my question was what is the public school, the public educational sector; how do they also contribute to a cultural exchange with not only America, but other countries where Jamaicans actually attend school and live in those nations? Anthony Johnson: Let me get your question. You are saying that the relationship between the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Northern Caribbean University graduates and American communities is that there's a lot of two-way flow? You don't know whether this is so in the case of the other public school graduates and so on? David Barnes: Correct. Anthony Johnson: And, well, truthfully I don't know the extent of the Seven-day flow to be able to measure it against the extent of the others. I don't know. I know that the Seventh-day Adventists are the only institution which has been able to run an educational system without one dollar from the government in Jamaica. It is quite amazing that they're able to do it, and it has meant for Jamaica tremendous easing on our budget and giving us -- I mean, the Northern Caribbean University is now up to producing Ph.D.'s, and it isn't costing the state or the taxpayer a single penny, so we are very grateful. However, all the churches do have some sort of links, but none of the churches have as powerful an educational system as the Seventh-day Adventists. I mean, I'm a Methodist, and we don't have any institution. We own Excelsior High School, that's the one that we do. The Anglican Church owns a number of schools, but they have very little input -- I mean, except they are on the board, but in terms of the curriculum and in terms of the social outreach, this is largely through the past students association. Which is a much weaker link than a church link, which you seem to have an arrangement where you tithe, and I suppose you can give a part of your tithes through that. The rest of the denominations don't tithe, so that means that they have less resources than the Seventh-day Adventists does. Female Questioner: Good afternoon His Excellency. I have the distinguished honor in thanking you for inviting me today to share this beautiful history of Jamaica's education. And I am a product of Jamaica myself, and I'm very proud to say that throughout the world that I have been and especially in the United States, our people here in the United States are wondering how we do not have more exchange of students as to sharing the many educational facilities now, in which we have in Jamaica. Could you elaborate a little bit on that for me? Anthony Johnson: Exchange students, meaning students from here going to Jamaica to learn? Female Questioner: To further their education. Anthony Johnson: Well, first of all, we are challenged with spaces. I mean, every year we get, we can only accept maybe 60, 70 percent of the applicants that we have for most of the faculties at the University of West Indies. We get far more -- and so it is for all the others. So we couldn't -- because we are short of space, we don't really have enough spaces to be allowing foreign students to come in. One of the things that we have been looking at, at Mona, is the business of getting students to come down for summer schools. And certainly, in Management Studies Department where I teach, we have had some success where we do have some students coming. But all the faculties don't have it, and we do have the institution, which is more or less empty during summer. Certainly all the comprehensive colleges, the teacher training colleges, the University of Technology and Mona itself are relatively empty at summer. And we would be, I think, very happy to get proposals from institutions up here that would wish to organize them to come down and to study in the summer, in Jamaica. We'd be very happy to have it. Female Questioner: Thank you, His Excellency, and thank you for a job well done. Kathleen Rotford [spelled phonetically]: Thank you. My name is Kathleen Rotford. I'm a masters student at Howard University, and my question has to do with something that you brought up a few times in your talk, and one of the earlier questions touched upon this. When you discussed the lack of success for the males, there are some similar patterns that we see in the U.S., within the African-American community. It seems that the African-American males have a more difficult time being admitted into college, and even when they are admitted, to be retained. Do you see any similar patterns between the two societies that could be possibly causing this pitfall for them? Anthony Johnson: Yeah, well, it is, in my view, the male -- the black male has more problems because we are less socialized and more inured towards bucking the system. That's a part of all culture: buck the system, buck the man. The man is against you. Who is the man? The man is the system, the structure, the institutions. And I make the point that for 200 years what the institution first of all started to do was to tell us that we are -- that to be black means bad, that Africa never produced anything, that we are not worthy of living around them, and that sort of thing. And what I try to point out is that the societies in West Africa were not as bad as is generally presented, and the male has got his back up. And if I might say so, I think that the greatest contribution of your present president is to show that the system can work for blacks as well as for whites. And the Caribbean community of black men up here is also showing to the wider African-descended population that it can work because, like I said, every school has large numbers of Jamaican black men who do very, very well. They occupy positions of eminence. And not just today; Marcus Garvey started it back in the early 1900s, and it has continued right through to the present day. Chris Daly [spelled phonetically]: Good afternoon Ambassador. I'm Chris Daly. My question has to do with -- you mentioned a new emphasis is going to be on kindergarten education, where the 3- to 5-year-olds will be the focus. How do you square that with the issue that at that age parents are the primary educators? Now are the parents going to be involved in making sure that that program is a success? Anthony Johnson: Thank you very much sir. That really is the challenge, because in Switzerland, which is one of the best-educated countries in the world, doesn't start you in schools until your are age seven, and it means that the mothers are highly sophisticated and do a great job on their children. Our problem is that the home is not producing the level of support and is not producing the level of structure that seems to be giving the child the attitude and the readiness for learning which a child ought to have when it gets into the formal system at age six. So you can't simply sit down and throw your hands up. What you've got to do is put in the intervention, which is to do what the home is not doing. And it's an expensive business, and its unfortunate, but we have to do it. We have no choice. Otherwise you'll continue to have the 18,000 students in the prep schools being great -- they're Rhodes scholars, Jamaican scholars are really tops, and then at the other end of the line you have 60 percent failing mathematics at the CXC level, which is certainly not acceptable. So we just have to go ahead with it. Kia Penso [spelled phonetically]: Good afternoon. My name Kia Penso. I'm a writer. I wanted to ask you more about sort of the cultural expectations of education in that period that you've just finished talking about, and I'm particularly interested, say, from the late-19th century through the 50s. It seems to me that there was an idea of to be a culturally competent person, you needed education, and it wasn't just the economic motive for achievement. There was an honor involved in it. And I wonder if you could speak to that whether there still is that feeling, whether I'm imagining this, or whether anybody has written about those aspects of education, of what people actually hoped to get out of their schooling. Anthony Johnson: Well, in the period in which you speak, between 1 percent and 5 percent of the age cohort went to high schools. So, indeed, in that period, usually only 40, 50 percent of the students got into primary schools, elementary schools and the system was that a parent would look at a child and say, "Well, this child doesn't have any head for learning," and so they would go to school and basically whenever there was anything that needed doing around the home they would not go to school. So by the time they were 12, 13, they were a part of the labor force. The ones who were persisted with were the ones who, for some reason, had a bias or an interest in academics, or in book work, or some facility in mathematics or something like that, but it still meant -- what I'm telling you is that when we started the system of the junior secondary schools, far less than 20 percent of the students at secondary level were in institutions. This meant 80 percent were out there. So obviously, the 20 percent who were in are the ones who have a great love for learning, who are interested and so on. It really is demographics. Once you spread it to the point where you're up to 95 percent, you are talking differently. Now, the person who wrote the World Bank loan and got this for 60 secondary schools -- which revolutionized education throughout the Caribbean and now throughout the world, because education is the number one expenditure of the World Bank, whereas at that point we had to fight to get it accepted -- is in the audience, Mr. Dick Woodham, Mr. Richard Garnett Woodham is here. Would you stand up please? Mr. Woodham was the man who did that work. [applause] And I don't know if he would care to make a comment on that, Dick, about whether the people are more interested now in education than they were before. Richard Garnett Woodham: We have to begin with the way in which Jamaican education was developed, as explained by our Ambassador. But there's one saving grace, and that saving grace was that the schools, the elementary schools carried what was called an old age component. At one stage, that old age component carried through to the age of 15. Now once they've reached between 12 and 15, then there's three years of very hard work which has to be put in, and they do invariably put it in. We usually had an exam, which was called the grammar school primary arm -- first, second and third year -- for Jamaican locals, which provided a fair amount of education for schools at that stage. And one of the things that we sort of wanted to ensure was that we didn't collapse the 12 to 15 age group, and that was one of the important things which the Minister, Edwin Allen, did to ensure that the education was continued in that age group. So that the damage that was created was not that serious, so that whether or not the secondary -- [unintelligible] changing of the name of the 12 to 15 is critical is another matter, because you can simply change the name of the school from elementary to secondary. Whether or not you have a secondary curriculum is another matter, and whether or not that secondary curriculum is effective in ensuring that the results are, in fact, what one would expect. So that we have a situation there where -- we're lucky in one sense. When we went through the drafting of the old system and so on, we had to leave the local exams in place, and we had to leave a number of schools with the 12 to 15 age group, leaving them to carry on as they carried on in the past. I don't want to go too much further because [unintelligible] exercise, okay. [applause] Male Speaker: You mentioned that when the educational system was mostly at the hands of the church, the students seem to have been carrying on with much greater, you know, reception, intellectual reception and so on and so forth. And since nowadays you have about 95 percent of Jamaicans at least getting the basic education, that it seems like the standard itself has been lowered. Does that really have to do with the fact that they were -- I mean, just, in your opinion, your educated opinion, would that have to be also with an issue of the standard that's set by government regulations in Jamaica and the matter of whether the teachers themselves are certified, the number of teachers are certified, where they are certified and all those other issues as well? Are they involved in the fact that students don't seem to be as educated, as "well educated," as they used to be when education was mostly the purview of the church? Anthony Johnson: Well, I don't know, but it's a matter of demographics. If you have 30 percent of the children in school, the 30 percent would, by a somewhat natural process, be the ones who are most interested, and therefore probably the ones who would be most effective. When you expand it to 90 percent, you're getting a lot of the children who are not interested. You're also getting a lot of parents who don't have the capacity to support the children, because the home is a critical part of education. What we have found, for instance, in the inner city -- I mean, and it's a worldwide thing -- is that in a household which is overcrowded the children don't have a place to do homework. It's quite a different business when you have, when you live in a home where there's a study, and you have a computer, and you have books on the walls. I mean, there are homes where there are no books on the walls, so the children haven't learned to see a book as a friend or a book as a part of their environment, which is a middle-class endowment, and which, in the United States, is a total thing, since your middle class spreads to 95 percent of the population. I don't know that it means that the system at present is necessarily not as good as it was when the school was running. It is a fact, though, that the emphasis on religion and on, you know, the Ten Commandments, and on proper behavior and so on, did act as a strong moral guide to the activities in the church, in the schools. So, for instance, teachers were willing to work for very, very low wages, and because a part of their religious contribution was what they did because you were working for the church. And the parson was a man who owned the church, so it wasn't merely a matter of money. They were making a religious contribution through training God's children. They had to start every morning with prayer and hymns, and in many schools also end with prayer and hymns, and ensure that the children went to Sunday School on Sunday. So it was a different paradigm at the time. Deirdre Williams [spelled phonetically]: Good afternoon Ambassador. My name is Deirdre Williams. I am a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, and I am a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago. I wanted to ask you to clarify two seemingly inconsistent things that I heard when you spoke. The first was that, on the one hand, you talked about Jamaica trending towards 80 percent services in terms of its GDP, and so there being this need for schools to create skilled persons who could enter the workforce and meet the needs of employers in the workplace. And I think you mentioned that on two occasions. But then in your closing summary remarks you talked about preparing students for 20th century skills and values and thinking, and I feel as if there might be some disconnect in terms of saying we're training you to come out and take up jobs, almost like kind of a manpower-planning approach, whereas I see 20th century skills as critical thinking, leadership, being able to think of the world as a global village and to play on that stage with anyone from any part of the country and any part of the world. And I wonder if, perhaps, the approach to training for services is probably responsible for some of the delinquence, some of the violence that we see among barrel children. Is it that there is a curriculum that isn't training students for that 20th century values, skills, attitudes. And if I'm wrong, please help me clarify. Anthony Johnson: Okay, thank you. Well, I didn't really raise the issue of curriculum very much today, and you are the first question that has zeroed in on it. The curriculum in elementary schools all over the world is the same, and that goes up to age 12. So there is no problem there. When you get into secondary schools, there is a difficulty, in that we had a system up until the 1980s where what in fact our curriculum was training you to do is to gain entrance to university, so that my school leaving certificate is an external certificate from the University of Cambridge. That's what's -- and Cambridge established this as a means of recruiting people from Britain, and we got under it through Archbishop Nuttall from the 1870s. So it wasn't training you to do anything necessarily, because it was training you in the classics, or in the sciences to become a physician. That was all Cambridge was training you for. The world has since changed. It's a revolution. You now need people who have skills, you know, to do whatever, but at the same time, you also need the critical thinking to which you refer. We weren't necessarily taught anything about critical thinking or so on. You did Latin. People who went through might like -- go to Italy today in my period, and you can trace the Caesar-Gallic wars. It's good to learn Latin and to understand the campaigns of Caesar and so on, and it might be that out of it you can gain some amount of logic and so on. But things like logic, critical thinking, analysis and so on, we really were not taught those things, and today the curriculum doesn't either. What the curriculum does is to teach your straight academic subjects and to have a practical element. So we do do wood work, metal work, sewing, office procedure, things like that; information technology, which is now a part of general literacy. As to whether you can train someone in some of these skills to get into the workforce and practice them, most employers, I'm told, say what they want is a person who is motivated to learn and who is fully literate and, you know, and their system will pick you up and take you from there, rather than for you to come in with sort of set ideas about how you are going to operate. It's a big debate, as you know, that continues. Eveed Daseries [spelled phonetically]: Hello, my name is Eveed Daseries. I'm actually a Ph.D. from Howard. I am just wondering. A good friend of mine here always mentions that education is supposed to create effective citizens, and I know in the case of Haiti we do have trouble with French and Mission Creole. So what happened is that we do have [unintelligible] French but, again, some have disconnected from the rest of the majority, I mean of the people. So how effective is it to make an education in terms of making sure everyone understands your Queen's English, and also the everyday language of the country? Anthony Johnson: Well, as I pointed out, it's a big challenge. Unfortunately, it is not a challenge if you are well-educated, because I am perfectly literate, and understanding Jamaican Creole and speaking Jamaican Creole. I have no issue and, indeed, very often my own thinking is in Jamaican Creole. Just today I was thinking of something and it was annoying me and I said I heard somebody say I said something to myself, "Don't pull my tongue." Now "don't pull my tongue" is Jamaican Creole. It doesn't mean anything [laughs] -- [laughter] It means do not exercise my mind to answer you adequately. Don't pull my tongue. Very, you know, effective means of communication. Other people speak three or four languages and don't have any problem in going between them in terms of their capacity to articulate or to communicate in various areas, so I don't see it as a problem for educated people. Where the problem is persons who have not gotten adequate education and who are only really communicable in the Jamaican Creole, and the question is how does one get them to be completely compliant in normal English? It's a big problem, because we don't have a written script. Now in Haiti, your script is written. Our script is not yet written, and when you write it -- there have been two or three attempts -- it looks like Norwegian, if anybody knows what Norwegian looks like. [laughter] It's very, very difficult and people who have looked at it and said, "You're crazy. I can't read normal English, you expect me to read this new script." I really don't have an answer. The one thing is true is that Jamaican Creole will not die, because if people can leave here 200 years ago, and living in San Andreas and in Colombia and in Bluefields in Nicaragua, who have never been to Jamaica, who know nothing at all about Jamaica, but who only speak that language. And in French and Spanish -- they can become literate in Spanish, but when it comes to English, their English is Jamaican Creole. And no one has taught them. They learned from the home and they teach it to their families and it continues. And it is a very beautiful and expressive language, so I don't think it should be seen as a block or a problem. I think we can still teach people proper English as well as Creole. I don't see that holding us back. Kia Penso: Hi. It's Kia again. I wanted to follow up on Deirdre's question, which was actually a better version of the question that I was trying to ask, which is -- this idea of a humanistic education. For instance, in practical terms I look at, for instance, this problem of 80 percent of tertiary graduates leaving Jamaica to go and work overseas, and it seems like part of that is -- part of the motivation for that is within the realm of humanistic education; that is, people can be taught to at least inquire into the possibility of making even a temporary sacrifice. What kinds of ideas make that seem like a reasonable choice for someone who has just finished school and wants to get on? In what way -- that is, there are many ambitions that people have. They're just not intellectual, and while I think it's terrific to train every one for a job in the tourist industry we have to ask whether it really offers that kind of satisfaction, and maybe we can consider a way to sort of look at the whole problem of Jamaican education in humanistic terms, in terms of people contributing more than their labor, but also their imaginations and their moral feelings to resolving some of these problems. It's a little bit everybody's problem, it seems to me. And so that's why, I guess, I wondered whether there was something that you could learn from the past attitudes to education, where there was a feeling that you did this to become a human being. I mean, it was maybe a mistaken idea, but people had it. Anthony Johnson: Yeah, well, as I said, I don't know what percentage of the population who were being educated were being caught up in that sort of intellectual discourse. Most children go to school because your parents send you, and you learn whatever your teachers teach you. The concept of the good citizen, and that you really are being taught to be a part of a community -- two communities, as Bishop Gibson would say: first of all a community of people here on earth, and eventually to go to the community in heaven. That was his entire life, teaching us that, that we're really preparing ourselves for another life. That was Gibson, and there were people who taught that across, but I don't know that all the schools did it to the extent, certainly, that he did. I think most people, when you leave school, the first thing that you want to do is to earn a livelihood, pay your own rent, and be able to become an individual, an independent individual. And the society that offers you the greatest opportunity to do that is the one to which you would be attracted. I always speak about two things: globalization and materialism. And while there was a time when people who lived away from the towns did not have access to what was happening in the modern world, today with the sort of absolute junction of the world, with television, there are people whom you will find in any part of the world, certainly in any part of Jamaica, who know the soap operas over here as well as you do, might better than you. And what the soap operas and so on are teaching you are a whole range of ideas and norms which don't relate to your situation, so you are in your head getting a psyche for a different type of society, and you want to migrate to that society because that's what setting your norms; not the local district, certainly not the local church, which it used to be. The church; indeed many of the schools were in the church, or if it was a high enough church, under the church, or a church building, just beside the church, all of it. They were part of the church, so you weren't too far from your local community, and there was no communication out. You saw the land next door as the piece of land that you would like to plant for something. But now you are hearing about Flatbush and Brooklyn Heights and [laughs] you know, [unintelligible] or whatever it is, because that's where the soaps are coming from, and that is a part of the acculturation. So whether you can fight against that to go to be speaking in terms of, as you said, humanization and a humanistic idea of building your own cart, and being a part of your local community, and being yourself, and asking yourself questions and all that. Those are great theoretical questions for you and me. A little man just leaving school, I think he really -- he has to go where he can earn a livelihood, he thinks, and he's not really caught up in that debate. Chris Daly: It's Chris Daly again, Ambassador. I want to return to the issue of young men, and are there any initiatives on the way or in the planning stage to try to address the issue of getting young men engaged and acculturated into our society? Anthony Johnson: Thank you very much. It's seen as one of the major problems, and there are a number of the service clubs who have started programs where they go into the inner city and attempt to relate to young men and to get them involved. We have expanded the cadet corps. There's a cadet corps, which is a uniformed organization in the schools, where they are trained to wear uniforms, and to handle arms, and to go to camps, and to develop the esprit de corps, which is what is critical; and out of that esprit de corps, to understand ideas of loyalty, organization, punctuality and having some sort of focus. And it's recognized as a big issue and, like I said, the service clubs, some of them have done it. However, it is a relatively new concept that that is a problem. All this time I've been talking about the problem of getting women involved into the system. We now have a problem with the men as well, so it's something that needs work. It needs academic work to look at it, and to see what can you do about it? There are theories, you know, that if a household is headed by a woman, then the girls will get along faster because the mother relates easier to the woman and she teaches the girl. She knows how a girl ought to behave and react to circumstances. She can't do that to the boy, because he's male, and if he doesn't have a male role model, which they don't often do -- they don't have it in the home and they don't have it in the school, because 80 percent of the teachers are women. So this is seen as a part of the difficulty that we are having in terms of getting men socialized. So it needs a lot of academic work and a lot of experiments and practical application, and it's just something that we have to work through. David Watson [spelled phonetically]: His Excellency and your guests, this is just quite an update that I'd like to ask. I was born back in the '30s, where the British and her Majesty -- which I met her in 1950 for the first time -- and the parochial school which is called a government school, they were much of those. And that's where our humble beginning began, and you grew to love education because of your parents teaching you what to get. And the real question is we got all our curriculum and our books and education came from England. Now the question is during that time and during our independence has anything changed, His Excellency, in our curriculum and materials that we are now using for the kids that are now going through school? Anthony Johnson: Yes, well, for one, we now teach West Indian history, which is a big thing. We only studied -- in my time, and went through into the 1960s -- we were only taught British history or Commonwealth history. We now have West Indian history being taught, and that's a big thing. West Indian authors are used for literature, West Indian poets. They know, they read Naipaul and Channing and all the well-known poets -- Claude McKay. All of these things we now know. Literature is coming out from us, so that we have indigenized, to some extent, the curriculum. David Watson: Thank you, His Excellency. I am David Watson, Commissioner for the District of Colombia At Large, Washington, D.C., District of Columbia Housing Authority. Thank you. Female Questioner: Ambassador, I have a quick follow-up question. I was very happy to hear you make the link between education and citizenship. You said something a moment ago about the creation of citizens, and you talked about citizenship as creating someone to be part of a larger community, almost referencing that as the aim of citizenship. How do you reconcile that with the stated aim of citizenship proposed by the Education Transformation Task Force in 2004 as being a way of addressing violence and deviant behavior in schools? Anthony Johnson: I mean, now, that's only one aspect of it. The fact is we do have a problem of deviant behavior, which leads to this outbreak of violence and so on, and inability to relate properly, but eventually everyone who graduates from school becomes a part of the labor force. And the labor force does require, first of all, certain attitudes. You have to go to work and believe that a job is something that is good for you. You can't go to a job with an attitude that a job is bad for you. If you're -- and Michael Manley picked that up in several of his books and said that people go to work and they don't want to see it as a part of their creativity as human beings, that they object to the work. And he felt we need to have more of an understanding, and calling on the employers, to make the workplace more worker-friendly, and this is a challenge that is faced all over the world, not only faced in the Caribbean. And the education transformation team -- I don't recall that particular charge that you are speaking of -- want, first of all, to get a higher level of outcomes. You can't have a situation where, as you pointed, only 20 percent of the people are passing mathematics. It means that there is something wrong and those people are in the labor force, the 80 percent who don't understand properly how to handle figures. So the business of education is not either/or; an individual is a part of the labor force and an individual is also a creative person who wants to ensure that he or her makes a contribution during life, but it's also a person who is a part of a community. You are a citizen, and you relate to others, and it is your business to ensure that whatever community you live in you make a contribution, not merely passively through paying taxes or stopping at stop signs, but actively through participation in what is now called civil society. All of that is really a part of the didactic process, which we are talking about. [applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov. [end of transcript]