EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOBILITY

THE CASE OF THE JAMAICAN PEASANT

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Education and Social Mobility: The Case of the Jamaican Peasant was written and published in 2008. As background, the Paper describes:

  1. The four major institutions that formed the peasant communities, (free villages) that newly freed slaves established to enable themselves to move off plantations and away from the degradation of slavery.
  2. The three main periods of engagement of the Colonial State with public education between 1834 and 1962 in Jamaica: The Delinquent Colonial State, 1834 to 1865; the Benevolent Colonial State 1866 to 1899 and the Re-aligned Colonial State 1900 to 1962.
  3. Changes in the involvement of Christian denominations over the period 1834 to 1962

Against this background the Paper details the patriarchal communities that free villagers, with support from dissenting Christian Denominations, established  to rectify the matrifocal forms that had developed in slavery and how these translated into male-biased upward social mobility patterns that favored men and boys in the 19th century as well as how female-biased upward social mobility patterns emerged in the 20th century as the Colonial State, with the support of Christian Denominations, favored education of girls and women. The Paper documents empirical data on school enrolment and literacy disaggregated by gender, race, and age to provide evidence of the shifts in patterns described.

The Paper concludes with a discussion of what the patterns of relations between education and upward social mobility of the descendants of African ancestry in Jamaica, over more than a century, contribute to two seminal debates on the legacy of slavery and African retentions. The first debate was in the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s between E. Franklin Frazier, "The Negro Family in the United States", and Melville J. Herskovits, "The Myth of the Negro Past". The second was between Raymond T Smith and Michael G Smith in the 1960s about the nature of Caribbean societies.

References are also made to the works of Edith Clarke, ‘My Mother Who Fathered Me’ and George Beckford, ‘Persistent Poverty’. The observation is made that while the Case of the Jamaican peasant is congruent with some positions taken by these sociologists, anthropologists, and economists, the central consideration appears to be the structure of opportunity sponsored by groups controlling the State and the cross-purposes of those participating in the education system.

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free, Marginality, marginalization, Marginalized

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Defining the Caribbean by some of its contradictions

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A Conference was planned for the year 2000 on the Theme: The Intellectual Traditions of the Caribbean. I was invited and submitted this Paper: Defining the Caribbean by its Contradictions. The paper was accepted for presentation at the Conference which did not take place. It is therefore referenced here as a Mimeograph Paper.

Defining the Caribbean by its Contradictions does not describe the Intellectual Traditions of the Caribbean directly. Rather, it proposes the major contradictions and cross-currents of Caribbean experience which shape and influence ways of knowing, patterns of thought, mindsets, and genres of argumentation from which Caribbean Intellectual Traditions emerge as they seek to address the unresolved tensions inherent in these contradictions. Implicitly the paper asserts that Caribbean Intellectual Traditions are dynamic and not static and have to be understood from the perspective of imperatives that are neither fixed nor final.

The Paper explores six major contradictions and cross-currents that mark the Caribbean. These are:

  1. Migrant mainstreams
  2. Dominant minorities and marginal majorities
  3. Modern societies of modest means
  4. Cultural cradle on the economic periphery
  5. Common history, identity and destiny punctuated by diverse insularities
  6. Creative folk and conforming intelligentsia.
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    Professor Errol Miller has had a rather unique professional and public service career which has given him almost a three hundred and sixty-degree exposure within the education enterprise. He has been a high school science teacher; university lecturer in science education; college principal; university professor, chancellor of a university college, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education; independent senator in the Parliament of Jamaica; a president of the teachers’ association; a chairman of the board of the state broadcasting corporation; chairman of the Electoral Commission of Jamaica; a researcher; an author; an international consultant; chairman or member of several school and college boards.

    Experimenter Effect and the Reports of Jamaican Adolescents on Beauty and Body Image

    Book Cover: Experimenter Effect and the Reports of Jamaican Adolescents on Beauty and Body Image

    This Publication is not currently in Print or available in Electronic Form. Should there be sufficient interest, we will explore the feasibility of obtaining the necessary permission to make it available in electronic form, either free or at the lowest cost.

    Published in Social and Economic Studies Volume 21 No. 4 December 1972.

    Experimenter Effect and the Reports of Jamaican Adolescents on Beauty and Body image is an empirical investigation primarily into personal attribute effects that may occur in survey research employing open-ended questionnaire which requires respondents to report on their conception of beauty and of their body cathexis of their body image. In the survey and psychological research, it is virtually impossible to employ interviewers, counsellors, and experimenters who have no personal attributes. The critical question what effect, if any, do their personal attributes have on the responses of subjects to questionnaires, interviews, scales, and tests. In a previous study Body Image Physical Beauty and Colour among Jamaican Adolescent Social and Economic Studies Vol 18, No 1 1969 Pp 72-89 Miller had administered an identical questionnaire personally. Being a male mulatto this study was conducted to probe personal attribute effects.

    The design of the study was that of selecting students of one racial type (Black) who attended the same type of school, were of the same age and social class randomly into six groups; select six female experimenters of similar age, physical attractiveness and forthrightness of personality but on six distinctly different racial types; assign each experimenter to administer the same open-ended question to one of the six groups of students using exact instructions; and to analyze the responses of each group in relation to the experimenter administering the questionnaire. There was one Chinese, one Indian, one Mulatto; one Black with an ‘Afro’ hairstyle; one Black with straightened hairstyle and one White experimenter. The six groups of students ranged in size from 66 to 73 students. The overall sample consisted of 158 boys and 255 girls.

    Student responses were analyzed with respect to the quantity and content of responses given to each of the six Experimenters, by boys and by girls,  with respect to their conception of the Handsome Boy; the Beautiful Girls; Satisfaction with their Body Image and Dissatisfaction with their Body Image.

    The major findings of this study were the following:

    • The common composite concept of beauty reported in Miller (1969) was confirmed.
    • The common composite concept of beauty was reported to all experimenters. In other words, the physical features of the experimenters did not appear to make any difference to what the adolescents reported with respect to their ideals of physical beauty.
    • There were variations, however, among experimenters in what subjects responded with respect to their assessment of their personal physical features. In other words, experimenter effect appeared in subjects critical assessments of their physical features.

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    Experimenter Effect and the Reports of Jamaican Adolescents on Beauty and Body image is an empirical investigation primarily into personal attribute effects that may occur in survey research employing open-ended questionnaire which requires respondents to report on their conception of beauty and of their body cathexis of their body image. In the survey and psychological research, it is virtually impossible to employ interviewers, counsellors, and experimenters who have no personal attributes. The critical question what effect, if any, do their personal attributes have on the responses of subjects to questionnaires, interviews, scales, and tests. In a previous study Body Image Physical Beauty and Colour among Jamaican Adolescent Social and Economic Studies Vol 18, No 1 1969 Pp 72-89 Miller had administered an identical questionnaire personally.

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    Being a male mulatto this study was conducted to probe personal attribute effects.

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    Education and Society in Jamaica

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    This Publication is not currently in Print or available in Electronic Form. Should there be sufficient interest, we will explore the feasibility of obtaining the necessary permission to make it available in electronic form, either free or at the lowest cost.

    First published in Savacou No. 5 1971. Reprinted with permission in Sociology of Education: A Caribbean Reader. Edited by Peter M. E. Figueroa and Ganga Persaud: Oxford University Press 1976. Pp 47-66

    In the 1960s Michael G. Smith had defined West Indian societies as plural and composed of three sections defined by colour -White, Brown, and Black – which were held together by force. One the other hand Raymond T Smith that West Indian societies were stratified into social segments sharing common values. This paper described Jamaican society at the end of the 1960s as being composed of four social strata Upper, Traditional Middle, Emerging Middle, and Lower which were multiracial to different degrees. While the Upper, Traditional Middle and the Lower strata shared many features described by M. G. Smith, the Emerging Middle Class was new and therefore did not fit neatly into plural sections. Whether the Jamaican society was shifting from a plural past to a heterogeneous future was left to time to tell. The paper then examined enrolment in public and private schools at early childhood, primary, secondary and further education levels attended by children of four strata described. Using data from empirical studies the paper analyzed the socio-economic and racial backgrounds of children attending different types of public schools. It also examined the proportion of students of the four strata attending high schools based on government policy of merit as the basis for access to public secondary schools. The paper also discussed public perception of falling standards because Government policy of expanding access to Cambridge examination passes in the English Language for the period 1949 to 1970. The paper concludes with a discussion of dysfunctionality as a source of evolutionary change in the Jamaican education system.

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    UWI’s Contribution to Caribbean Education

    An Assessment

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    This Publication is not currently in Print or available in Electronic Form. Should there be sufficient interest, we will explore the feasibility of obtaining the necessary permission to make it available in electronic form, either free or at the lowest cost.

    In The University of the West Indies 40th Anniversary Lectures. Editor. F R. Augier. The University of the West Indies, Mona: Kingston 1990. Pp 47-64

    In assessing the UWI’s contribution to education over the period 1948 to 1988, this essay follows two main lines: what a university is and what it does or stated alternatively, its being and its actions. In terms of being universities follow two main functions elite and popular. Its elite function has three main elements: providing a literal education; creating new knowledge and selecting and certifying a social elite. Its popular function has two elements providing places to as many students to continue education beyond high school and to provide useful knowledge and services. Using this schema the essay assessments to the contribution that UWI has made in the Commonwealth Caribbean in the field of education over the period of its first 40 years. The essay concludes with the observation that Caribbean policy makers, planners, and educators have been operating largely within the conceptual framework of the colonial past and the development hypothesis. With respect to the development hypothesis, Miller confesses to being an unrepentant agnostic because the latter confuses more than it clarifies and perpetuates much more than it changes.  The challenge of the UWI was and would continue to be helping leaders and people to think through this dilemma and paradox.

    UWI’s Contribution to Caribbean Education

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