Tuesday, August 15, 2006

I find our public school teachers’ agitation for higher pay vulgar and embarrassing. I am a former Ministry-of-Education-employed teacher, 1978 to 1989 and I should understand their plight. I do.

What they think is the solution to it though is not. To pay them and any other group of public servants, the government merely has to pass the cost on to the ultimate employer, the people, and increase indirect taxes and or implement direct taxation.

What might result? Come next election the people could decide they no longer want this or that government. Our economy and culture would change. Our economy could collapse as a result of the impact of taxation upon the financial service sector and the tourist industry, these two sacred pillars and sacred cows in our national existence. This as well is a vulgar arrangement which raises the question, is our nation an illusion? And if this is true of ours, is this true of all nations?

My present, specific concern though, is the teachers’ agitation for higher pay which, if granted, resulting in the increase of the price of bread, gas, electricity and water, we’ll all be back at square one.

This they propose is one reason why more income is needed, because gas and other basics are so high but if they are made higher to provide increased salaries, it would have been a useless exercise.

The chief cause for dissatisfaction though, is jealousy, a basic human trait. One child displeased that another child, with the same parents, is treated better. We have degrees like lawyers, accountants, like engineers and look what they make, and look what we make, is the argument and the cry.

What is problematic and vulgar about this reasoning is the assumption that government is the parent. What is suggested is that government has called us to our vocations.

Though I taught school for eleven years, I am a writer, a poet. I’d published a book before I began teaching and published four others while I taught. This is my real calling.

In 1989 and ever since, I have been attempting to answer my true calling fully. At present I live exclusively off what I earn from books and a writer’s life.

Though I live and my bills get paid, I earn very little, but how extremely satisfying my life is, this resulting from obedience. I’ve gone where and to what I am called. My obedience is in large part my reward.

Who has called me is the question. Who owes me reward? As poet, whose child am I? To what parent or parents am I to look for satisfaction, comfort and reward? I look to government, I look to the nation and who has called me, I am unable to locate within the body politic.

Similarly, who has called the teacher to her, to his vocation and to whom should teacher or anyone with a vocation look ultimately for reward, both in this life as well as in the next?

It is vulgar to imagine that that call comes from no higher than government and to sulk that siblings in the public service seem more highly favored than are teachers. But who are a teacher’s true siblings? Not other public servants but poets, nuns, priest and whomever else has been called and has obey and has a vocation.

It is this which gives me comfort. Sister nuns and brother priests have always been my inspiration and continue to be. It is the sacrifice which a teacher must make for so little financial reward which is the teachers’ chief complaint. I find my sacrifice as poet, to be at least as great as theirs and the financial reward much less than theirs. But then there are nuns and monks who give their lives entirely to serve, on top of which they take vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience.

But it is not government which has called them or which rewards them or keeps them. It is by faith that they live. It is via faith that they are connected to who has called them, with faith that they serve and via faith that they are in turn rewarded. For anyone, with or without vocation, to work for money is vulgar and worse than vulgar. To work for money is prostitution. We must all instead, work for love and if we cannot we should instead not work and beg on street corners – beg for handouts from those who do work for love. This though sounds like Kahlil Gibran whom I read in my teens. Here it seems, we agree.

There is a horrible spiritual breakdown in our social procedure, a horrible spiritual void. Too many of us are working for money and the things of this world and competing for these and often to the death; but certainly to everybody’s detriment, in this world as well as in the next.

The dignity has gone out of living and out of working. We have all or nearly all, lost aim, lost focus and what we are producing are cesspools. Our societies are hell on earth.

I attempted to return to employment in the Ministry of Education recently. The pay was not a problem as it represented quite an improvement upon what a writer in The Bahamas earns. What I could not abide though was the blatant, misguided attempt to demean what I have made my life’s pursuits: my writing, what I have studied and the 2,500-plus books I’ve read.

I found it deflating as well as dehumanizing, not an improvement at all over my present condition – more money but much less dignity, too little appreciation of my gifts, achievements and of my person.

Having to be humiliated thus to teach in schools, in a system which should not exist at all, this seemed, not a paradox but a contradiction.

In 1968, I graduated from Pyfrom Secondary School and went to St. Anne’s and found myself in a world academically, I did not know existed. St. Anne’s, it seemed, was a place for human beings. The school I’d left, it seemed, was for who was a bit less human.

It is to this that public school teachers and their union must address their concerns. It is this which they must oppose and demand be improved, this unbearable, deadening environment, these warehouses in which they are required to work and in which the majority of the nation’s children must attempt to learn. Again I say, such places, these schools, should not exist, as they insult human dignity and the contradiction is that all the money already being spent along with all the effort being expended, is in vain, as it is impossible for these institutions to achieve what they exist to achieve.

Their existence is a contradiction. Such places are not for learning and are not for working in. I taught for eleven years on a farm as it were, knowing eggs could not and would not be laid, knowing that, in those environments, butter could not be made.

In the past, I’ve attempted to make Jell-O; placed a bowl upon a shelf in the refrigerator, returned later to find the solution in the bowl, not gelled at all but liquid still. Growing up, we often made ice cream at home. I remember times when I, when we, turned and turned the handle of the ice cream mixer, undid the lid only to find, not ice cream but milk. To make Jell-O, to make ice cream, the conditions must be right. Wishing alone is never sufficient.

What our public schools exist to produce is not being made. Is the aim scholars? Is it good citizens? Is it good workers? Is it satisfied, fulfilled teachers? Too few of any of these result and what is achieved is worth a very tiny fraction of what is expended from the public purse. Our public schools are not providing the Bahamian people value for money. It is additionally vulgar therefore to ask for more money to be heaped upon what is already being expended for the product being squeeze out of these schools into society.

More money for teachers is not the solution. The aims must be fixed and the partnerships involved in achieving our educational aims must be cultivated and sustained.

As a living writer in this community, I have been invited to address the entire student body or groups of students at L. N. Coakley High, at C.I. Gibson, at L.W. Young, R.M. Bailey, Stephen Dillet Primary but more often I have been invited to St. John’s, St. Anne’s and most often to St. Andrews and most recently to Jordan Prince William High. This dynamic though, is not engaged in enough. Most schools don’t even seem to know that Bahamian writers and poets exist or do not seem to know how they might incorporate them to the benefit of their students and their staff, especially in their Language Arts departments.

Recognition and involvement of Bahamian writers, regionally as well as world-recognized, in the process of education, I am not suggesting is a panaceas for it problems, as this entire system needs uprooting and re-rooting and not upon the fringes of national concerns, not saying one thing about the significance of education and doing another – not putting Junkanoo and sports in the place where the nation’s intellect belongs and should be flourishing. This, ultimately does not exclude Junkanoo nor sports but instead require them to be reincorporated but differently, emphasized otherwise, along with rather than at the expense of intellectual pursuits.

What is Over-the-Hill though, is over the hill and behind God back and behind the backs of politicians as well.

What they revere, lift up, genuflect before is still the tourist and the foreign investor except in matters, the bare minimum, required to get elected and re-elected.

What I wish to end with, to emphasize, is the milieu of dignity in which nuns and monks in poverty, live and serve. What they have put their hands to, given up this world and its pursuits for is so very life affirming. Similarly positive environments in our classrooms, in our halls of learning, have to be what is started with. To what extent is the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas included in learning nationally? What use is made of libraries and what is the state of these facilities in schools and nationally?

The very air at St. Anne’s seemed different from that at Pyfrom which I’d just left, from which I had recently graduated. What is it though to graduate from these so-called schools which are hardly more than dumping grounds and not places for learning with that deep respect and care the individual and the national intellect require, if these are to blossom and bear fruit.



© Obediah Michael Smith, 2006
3:23 p.m. July 3, 2006

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