Mitigation of the impact of HIV/AIDS and other chronic diseases on The Bahamas’ educational system is of immediate concern, the country’s educators heard last night.
Professor Dr. Rex Nettleford, who is the Chancellor Emeritus of the University of the West Indies, said that the Caribbean is second only to Sub-Saharan Africa in the rate of infection by HIV, and that “health and well-being” must be part of the educational agenda.
“An unhealthy populace can neither produce nor absorb learning,” Professor Nettleford said.
He delivered the keynote address at the opening of the Association of Tertiary Institutions of The Bahamas conference at SuperClubs Breezes on Cable Beach and lamented the replacement of political and colonial “overlords” by other cultural agencies.
Calling ignorance the most dangerous weapon of mass destruction, he urged educators to promote tertiary institutions as agents for social, economic and political change, and called education a “prime agent” of survival in the fight against ignorance.
Professor Nettleford, who is considered one of the Caribbean’s finest scholars, decried the idea among former colonial powers that “lesser races did not exist because they could not think,” and called on regional tertiary institutions to combat the lingering effects of what he termed “the racialization of consciousness.”
“In large parts of our hemisphere the CNNisation of consciousness is all but complete,” he said, “and people rush from campus classrooms to dorms or private homes to catch ‘The Bold and The Beautiful’.”
Modern-day globalization, which he associates with the “old obscenities” of imperialism and colonialism, functions on the basis of an historical amnesia, ignoring “the legacy of a shattered psychic landscape shared by people like ourselves.”
“Universities in these parts must affirm the paramount importance of safeguarding the values, standards and quality of an education designed to serve the societies they are set up to serve,” he insisted.
He referred to the strengthening of tertiary institutions around the region as necessary for the “decolonization of the Caribbean spirit,” and suggested roles for these institutions to play in society, including the generation of social, economic and political change.
Supporting the theme of this year’s conference, “Academic Research and The College Community: Informing National Development Shaping National Identity,” Professor Nettleford stated that the development process “would demand not only the activity of teaching but also of research, meaning the investigation, analysis and subsequent diffusion of findings with special reference to our historical experience.”
“One cannot overemphasize the importance of research for economic regeneration and human resource management in higher education covering all tertiary institutions,” the professor said.
Professor Nettleford encouraged “multi-sectional partnerships,” echoing calls from local education leaders such as Acting President of the College of the Bahamas Dr. Rhonda Chipman-Johnson to integrate the research capabilities of Bahamian professionals into the policy-making process.
“A major task is the production of new professionals,” said Professor Nettleford.
“The work of universities and these related organs of preparation is to have such persons informed through research activities.”
Colleges, universities and other higher education institutions, he said, serve to generate social, economic and political change in society.
Professor Nettleford also said it is obvious that “the education that is required for developing countries has to be output and throughput concentrated in order to supply the resourceful and creative human beings needed to face the harsh realities of existence by developing communities.”
By: Quincy Parker, The Bahama Journal
