8/13/2019 How We Stifle Our Own Creativity
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How we stifle our own creativity and innovationBy
Ian W. Walcott
Numbers dont lie. Barbados ranking on theHuman Development
Indexis now at number 38. Though this is still quitean impressive
standing, it marks a downward trend since the mid-1990s. In any
small business or Fortune 1000 company,this indicator would be a
call for serious concern, action and remedial intervention. The
evidence is there that Barbadoscontinues to be stifled byproject
implementation deficit,sluggish systemic reforms and an entrenched
conservatism thatbrings political will, desire and evaluated
performance to an almost grinding halt.
As an educator, life-long learner and owner of abusinessbuilt on
sharing knowledge, I continue to be appalled and shockedat the
primacy of form over content or the structure over substance that
plagues the evolution of the countrys educationsystem. This for me
is a personal story of pain and anguish for I remember using a
computer for the first time in my lifein 1988 immediately after
Alevels when I started to work at Barclays Bank. Certainly in the
early 1990s a colleague ofmine, Gino, would go on to win the
prestigious Barbados Scholarship and would later confess that when
he entered aCanadian university classroom as a teenager, he felt
stupid next to his Canadian peers because he was so far behind
interms of his computer literacy. Mind you, he was at the top of
Barbados educational food chain.
So this is internal paradox that I am here interrogating. How is
it that a country that ranks so high on the HumanDevelopment Index
can rank so low is terms of global competitiveness or even our
ability to facilitate business? In the2013-2014 Global
Competitiveness ReportBarbados ranks number 81 for our capacity for
innovation and on theWorldBanks 2014 Doing Business Report,we come
in at number 91, way behind St. Lucia which scores the highest in
the
Caribbean region at number 64. Numbers certainly dontlie.
Houston, theres a BIG problem!
As alluded earlier, I think the source of this problem lies in
our poor record at education reform, our conservative natureand,
frankly speaking, our arrogance. This was brought home to me by
recent renderings in the local press of calls to bancell phones at
school, students being sent home because their skirts were not two
inches below their knees and gestapotactics of schoolprincipals
sanctioning the searching of bags for cell phonesto outright public
beatings for late arrival atsecondary institutions of learning.
Believe it or not! Its Barbados in the early 21stcentury with
practices that are reminiscentof a bygone slave era together with
an institutionalized stifling of young people s creativity. Little
do these principals andeducators within our school system
understand that their behaviors, rules, policies and organizational
cultures, have adirect impact on our overall performance as a
nation.
Unfortunately, what should have been heralded as the
mega-project that would catapult us into the 21st century
wasstrategically undermined at every step of the way by these very
agents of reactionary blindness. They so stifled theEducation
Sector Enhancement Programme (ESEP), familiarly known as EduTech,
that Barbados today remainsuncompetitive in its school system from
primary right through to the tertiary level. One will be amazed
that teachers arestill using green boards and chalk while most
children possess a computer at home. The stunning astonishment was
furthercompounded to me when a masters student told me in 2002 that
she could not think in front of a computer. My heartbled knowing
that this individual would return to the job market with a
postgraduate degree to lord over her subjects allthe while boasting
of her academic achievements with the framed diploma on her wall to
prove it. The scariest part is thatthese are the ones charged with
the duty of making policy. So now you understand why Edutech
2000was severelyundermined and doomed to failure.
So we are now in an age of mobile technologies and buffoons
masquerading as educators are outright banning the use ofthese
devises in schools. How radical would it be to give each child in
school a smart phone, a tablet, a laptop and 24 hourWi-Fi access?
How radical would it be for government agencies to channel 50% of
their project funding to the Universityof the West Indies to
develop software solutions in conjunction with the worlds best
schools in order to come up withsolutions needed by our people?
Solutions like a single computerized ID card or an amalgamated
system that links all our
social bio-data required to access social services.
The pretense and continued ignorance in believing the myth that
we have a good education system must simply stop.Wake up! Bill
Gates dropped out of Harvard and Facebook was developed in a dorm.
Should we continue to steminnovation and curtail the natural human
instinct of curiosity, we will continue to see a downward trend in
our globalcompetitiveness, our facility or lack thereof for doing
business not only with the rest of the world but sadly with
ourselvesand ultimately our standing on the Human Development Index
will continue to further decline. So, its not about whethera child
is late for school or wears a skirt two inches too short or takes a
cell phone to school. Discipline matters but theresistance to form
and structure is the key ingredient to innovation.
Ian Walcott is a contributing writer toThe Burton Wire.He is an
international relations specialist and project consultant who
shuttles betweenthe Caribbean and Brazil.
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