Edutocracy: A Model of the New West Indian Plantocracy in Barbados

Abstract

This work draws on a combination of three theories, dependency (economics theory), the inner plantation as a socio-psychological construct, and plantation pedagogy (education theory) to develop its own educational theory called edutocracy, as a partial explanation of the failure of the West Indian education system in Barbados. It employs document analysis as its primary method of data collection and analysis and culminates in the construction of a model of edutocracy. Edutocracy reveals how the current West Indian debate surrounding educational reform of the Secondary School Entrance Exam in Barbados and neighboring islands will, like most previous reforms, net little meaningful change if legislators and educators continue to negate the impact of the socio-historical context on education in this region, specifically the deleterious colonial ideologies which continue to shape education for the Afro-West Indian/Barbadian with the interests of the Euro-American metropole as paramount.

Introduction

For decades, West Indian (WI) education reform has emphasized an empirical approach to educational change. West Indies is used in this work deliberately, though not pejoratively, to refer to the English-speaking Caribbean which was once under British rule. Reform has targeted visible educational “cracks” by making robust financial investments in finding solutions (e.g., Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States [OECS] Education Reform Strategy 1999; Caribbean Centre of Excellence for Teacher Training—United States Agency for International Development [USAID] funded). Today, there are growing appeals for education reform specific to assessment which too will require substantial funding of committees, consultants, trainers, new curricula, new testing protocols, and apparatus. I theorize, however, that the issue with the WI education narrative is its failure to historically contextualize the matter of reform, such that decision-makers continually miss the opportunity to explore the role of the region’s colonial history in the failure of this system. D. Jules (2015), a former Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) Registrar, makes this point when saying, “historical perspective is central . . . The unfortunate reality is that the post-colonial project in education has never fundamentally questioned the colonial inheritance” (paras 5 and 7).

The impact of social history has largely been ignored in the WI education reform narrative. WI governments have attempted to address the failure of education through the concrete observable cracks seen in teaching and learning, at the expense of the gaps, the larger, deeper, more abstract breaks caused by historical ideology. The effects of such gaps are evident in the likes of the Secondary Schools’ Entrance Examination (SSEE) which is said to exert adverse effects on curriculum, instruction, student achievement, and ultimately, quality of education (Government of Barbados, 1993). Resultantly, the issue of how to plan for and implement educational reform at the assessment level has recently received much attention across the region. In light of current growing petitions for reform of the SSEE (Applewhaite, 2018; Cumberbatch, 2020; Mendes-Franco, 2019; K. Smith, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c), I argue that now is the appropriate time to contextualize reform within a socio-historical discourse for meaningful results. This exam, a colonial holdover, serves mostly to strike fear in the hearts of 11-year-olds and their parents annually, with very few positive results, much like colonialism itself. This trauma is corroborated by experiences from veteran educators and psychologists recorded in the media (“The Cheese is Gone,” 2020; George, 2016; K. Smith, 2020a, 2020b). George (2016), for example, speaks of the lingering effects of this trauma as expressed by a young Caribbean migrant, graduating as valedictorian of an Ontario university who felt scarred at having failed the Common Entrance, but wanted people “back home” to know that one could still be a success despite this initial failure, an upsetting memory which still weighed on her mind a decade later. I revert to the use of colonialism to mean not only “an extension of sovereignty and control by one nation and its government over another, but . . . also a control of the mind of the conquered and the subordinated” (Alatas, 1977, p. 17) and additionally a “civilizing mission . . . an ideological formation intended to establish for the ‘other’ a view of the world and a concept of self and community, especially through the production, representation and dissemination of knowledge” (Kanu, 2007, p. 70). Colonialism therefore represents an ideological construct of geographical and psychological control resulting in how people (Afro-WI and the Westerner) perceive themselves and each other in relation to the world around and beyond them. Westerner is used in this context to refer to a White person usually of North American or Western European origin. It is through this lens of colonialism that WI educators will get a better view of the genuine problems of education and its concomitant effects.

The Research Problem

The WI educational system, though operating across many different WI territories, acts as a unified system, with several core identical characteristics, in the form of chalk and talk pedagogy, passive learners, overemphasis on identical national (Common Entrance at the primary level), and regional exams (CXC exams at the secondary level), culminating in national awards to mostly overseas universities for students earning the highest academic grades. This decade-old system continues to fail most of its students. For instance, most passes in CXC English are at the lowest acceptable level, Grade 3, with approximately 40% failing this language competency test yearly (see cxc.org). Glenroy Cumberbatch, a recently retired CXC Registrar addresses a worrying trend of some nearly 20% (more than 11, 000 out of 60, 000) failing to acquire a single pass at CXC (the average student sits five to eight subjects in one sitting), causing him to conclude that the region is not producing employable people (“Too Many Still Performing Poorly at CSEC,” 2018). Educators proffer that the system fails to properly assess students’ capabilities, teach children to think critically, address social ills, or provide equitable opportunities (“The Cheese is Gone,” 2020; “Give 11-Plus Few More Years,” 2020; Mendes-Franco, 2019). Much of the research concurs, but it too offers few resolutions. Like the region’s decision-makers, WI researchers tend to highlight the observable cracks, which affect discrete parts of the system, to define the failure of education in general. For example, they speak to teacher competence (Burns, 2017; Denny, 2010, 2011; Jennings, 2001), learner language in the classroom (Allsopp & Jennings, 2016; Britton, 2017; Nero & Ahmad, 2014; Siegel, 2007), educational leadership in schools (Beckford & Lekule, 2012; P. Smith et al., 2015; Thompson, 2019), and formative assessment methods as a form of selective education (De Lisle et al., 2017; Young & Jackman, 2014). All of which admittedly, are important research areas, but few have pinpointed the common denominator across these themes to account for systemic failures, namely, the ideologies upon which the system is constructed. Through this work, I am widening the discourse to introduce a more expansive narrative of the impact of colonial ideology on WI education reform initiatives. I propose therefore to rectify the obscurity of this relationship between ideology and WI educational practice by foregrounding these seldom discussed issues of colonial ideologies in the discourse. I contend that there can be no effective reform until the impact of edutocracy (Denny, 2020) on educational practice is clearly understood and adequately addressed. The goal of this research is therefore to develop a theory of edutocracy by conceptualizing a model of this construct with trifocal input from the lenses of dependency theory (Best, 1968), inner plantation (Brathwaite, 1975; Lavia, 2012), and plantation pedagogy (Bristol, 2010). As part of a socio-historical discourse, the wider composite lens of these amalgamated theories magnifies the scope of the issues surrounding edutocracy to illuminate the reasons for the failure of the WI education system, which can then inform the region on a path to meaningful education reform.

This article therefore explores a new educational theory, edutocracy (Denny, 2020). This is not the same as the power wielded by bureaucratic administrators in local school districts in America (Erskine, 2013). It is most recently applied to the WI context as a fusion of education and plantocracy to describe education officials at the highest decision-making levels who unquestioningly support plantocratic ideologies, policies, and practices that promote deleterious policies like European monolingual education in predominantly bi/multidialectal Afro-WI speech communities (Denny, 2020). However, plantocracy is more than the sum of its planters, and so I argue that edutocracy should not amount to the faces of education, the decision-makers within the system; hence, I am also using this research to reshape/redefine this construct. This article aims to clarify the construct edutocracy, through the conceptualization of its model. The model will depict the structural features of edutocracy (its form, what it looks like) to reveal its functional features, an explanation of how it works. In the future, the implications of preserving this system can be drawn from analyses of the model to assist in practical ways, legislators, researchers, and practitioners calling for educational reform for present and future Caribbean people (a deliberate break from the colonial WI label). By means of this model, this work proposes to advance understanding of the failure of the WI educational system by unpacking the ideologies that shape its educational practices as a step in a direction toward meaningful reform.

I will now provide a road map of the research. The work begins by contextualizing the problem in describing the prevalent issues facing WI education. A description of the methodology employed then follows; after which, I present a critical examination of the WI education system through the lens of the dependency, inner plantation, and plantation pedagogy theories, resulting in models of these theories. The work concludes by combining the emergent findings from these theories into the construction of a model of edutocracy, as a way of providing a sharper, more explicit focus of the construct as a partial explanation of WI education failure.

Context of the Study

In this study, the practice of WI education refers to the minimalist conception of education (Bewaji, 2008), rooted in schooling and institutionalization. It is largely an academic monolingual Standard English (SE) school system operating in a primarily bidialectal/multidialectal setting, which is characterized by high-stakes assessment in the school language, academism, textbook-driven curricula, teacher-centered approaches, and passive learners (Denny, 2020). It is therefore reduced to classrooms, teachers, syllabuses, exams, inspectorates, certificates, ceremonies, and so on (Bewaji, 2008, p. 6). Therefore, the articulated vision of WI education as a tool for teaching principles, helping people to think deeply, analytically, flexibly, and imaginatively to help themselves solve daily problems (Westfield, 2012) is at odds with its practice. In its current state, education serves to produce students who “reel out information learnt, pass examinations, possess all kinds of certificates and diplomas as qualifications for good jobs which they are only fit to apply for but not knowledgeable enough to create” (Bewaji, 2008, p. 8). Education is therefore misinterpreted narrowly as schooling and predominantly associated with employment.

The SSEE was introduced in the late 1950s as a way of promoting more equity among secondary school admissions (Layne, 1999). A mere handful of students were previously chosen from across an island by missionaries or representatives of the plantocracy for secondary education. With the introduction of SSEE, all primary school students at age 10 or 11 years would write two exams to test their English language and mathematics competencies for entry into the few secondary schools available on the islands. However, like its model, the British Common Entrance, there was fierce competition to get into select secondary schools, which were viewed as high-ranking, prestigious, and favored, places where future leaders would be groomed. Likewise, today an exceedingly small percentage of examinees gain entrance into these schools. For example, some 3,500 examinees vie for a mere 120 places allocated yearly to the “Eton College of Barbados.” Such intense competitive education has only served to reinforce racial, social, and economic privilege as it continues to shape a system “whose organizing principles and structural frameworks have assumed that a principal function of education is to sort and classify people” (D. Jules, 2015, para 7) based on academic intelligence.

A comparison of WI education in postemancipation times with current day education shows that little has changed despite several claims of reform (D. Jules, 2015). Notwithstanding increased educational opportunities for Blacks in the 1900 to 1950 period, elementary education “rendered them unemployable” and that education in first grade schools was “severely academic . . . having little contact with reality” (Ministry of Education, Youth affairs & Culture, 2000, p. 8). Nearly, a century later, many WI school leavers are still rendered unemployable according to former CXC Registrar Glenroy Cumberbatch (“Too many still performing poorly at CSEC”, 2018) because the academic curriculum is geared toward CXC assessment which produces a system unresponsive to students’ learning needs (Government of Barbados, 1993). In addition, in the early WI education period, access to tertiary education through the awarding of one national scholarship to Cambridge or Oxford meant that the examination process brought on a “murderously competitive” system among the secondary schools (Layne, 1999, p.2). Similarly, in the 2015 to 2016 academic year, only nine of the 5,239 students sitting the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) in Barbados (an exam for students who would have completed secondary education certifications and qualify academically to be certified at the postsecondary level) met the criteria for a national scholarship (Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, 2017, p. 18). The policy that guided these colonial times and continues postindependence is “blatantly elitist” because it reinforces “the ugly . . . class divisions of the plantocratic social order” (Layne, 1999, p. 1). Most of the past and present students awarded these scholarships come from privileged economic backgrounds which would allow their parents to pay for the foreign Western universities to which they all likely applied. In early times, some scholarship candidates felt themselves far too dignified, on account of their “superior” tertiary education, to be of use to the former life in the colonies (Layne, 1999, p. 2). Like their colonized predecessors, many scholarship winners today will likely not return to the islands to share their skills as they tend to pursue studies with little or no market support in the territories, “compelling” them to remain where they can earn a living. George (2016) therefore concludes that despite nurturing and graduating bright capable minds that have served the region well, these successes constitute a small percentage of the Caribbean citizenry who have considerable talent and achievement, but who emigrate, thus denying their talents to their own countries. Educational reforms have produced the same outcomes.

The WI practice of education as schooling disadvantages most stakeholders. Primarily, it results in a majority poorly certified school leaving force who are not adequately competent in the school language as evidenced by CXC annual reports showing high percentage failure rates and majority low passing grades in central subjects like mathematics and English language (see cxc.org). I maintain that notwithstanding a shift in the national education discourse around the themes of education for all, no child left behind, engagement and community learning, the foundational values remain the same (Dancy et al., 2018) because a traditional academic structure has been preserved which the society cannot fully accommodate (Westfield, 2012). Beyond schooling, most WI students are disadvantaged by the ideologies of the plantation model of policy design for African descendants (Jones, 2005) long before they enter the classroom. By ideology, I refer to Tollefson’s (1991) view of unconscious assumptions that become accepted as common sense based on the power structure in play, so that ideology is hardly neutral or innocuous in shaping behavior that contributes to the manufacture of consent and leads to assumptions about right and wrong. Unfortunately, the veracity of the ideology is not important, but rather how it comes to be believed in and to be lived out is more fundamental (London, 2003, p. 297). In the West Indies, colonial ideological remnants continue with us in the discourses of educational policy (Shahjahan, 2011), which remind us that while the post in postcolonial might suggest that colonialism is gone, education as cultural imperialism means that little has changed after independence (Enslin, 2017).

Not only has education policy remained largely unchanged, but so too have content and learning outcomes. Westfield (2012) acknowledges that “despite the thrust of successive leaders to make education relative to the needs of the state, there are very little changes in the outcome of education” (p. 166) because the content focus remains stagnant, being largely irrelevant to the needs of the changing society. A colonial problem in a postcolonial West Indies is a problem which can no longer be ignored. Because the education system maintains the status quo in favor of the minority as it did in colonial times, the WI education problem is a colonial problem (Lavia, 2012). Essentially, educational reform will not be meaningful if it operates within a social vacuum, being perceived as void of socio-historical context. In short, “unless educational reform happens concurrently with analysis of the forces of colonialism, it can only serve as a deeply insufficient Band-aid over the incessant wounds of imperialism” (Grande, 2004, p. 19). To help the system to progress, WI education reformers need to first accept the challenge of questioning the colonial inheritance in education. This article is a start in that direction.

In the following section, I present the methodology and then analyze the merits and the demerits of the three theories as explanations for WI educational failures, focusing on key assumptions made by each theory.

Method

This work is a piece of conceptual research based on my observations of WI education practices as a former student, teacher, teacher-educator, administrator, and researcher. It employs discussion records (notes and audio-recordings) from a previously unrelated research project with WI primary school teachers. The discussion centered on teachers’ attitudes to the use of the nonstandard as a medium of instruction. Educators’ attitudes were crucial to the construction of the edutocracy theory, as language attitudes get beyond practice into the assumptions and views that people hold about language education. These views and assumptions helped unpack the ideologies undergirding edutocracy, so although these discussions “constitute a product of another context . . . [they] . . . are grounded in the ‘real world’ making them important as a source of knowledge in yielding some relevant insights to the current research exercise” (London, 2002, p. 102). In addition, I examined the scholarly literature, educational documents (curricula, education acts, reform proposals, assessment reports), and related newspaper articles from across the region and beyond (similarly related colonial histories) as part of the data collection and analysis process. I employed coding to produce themes around education reform, colonialism, and plantation/plantocracy. Emerging themes from the data resulted in three major categorizations—dependency, inner plantation, and plantation pedagogy which helped to construct the edutocracy model. I employed inductive analysis to develop theories and models directly from the data in explaining the relationships among key concepts (Maxwell, 2013). From these analyses, I constructed visual representations of the dependency, inner plantation, and plantation pedagogy theories as they relate to education. The construction of an edutocracy model was the culmination of these combined representations, which is offered as a more coherent lens through which to peer at the WI education failures. The emergence of these three categories helped to formulate two main research questions which guided the study:

• Research Question 1: To what extent do the theories of (a) dependency, (b) inner plantation, and (c) plantation pedagogy account for failure of the WI education system?

• Research Question 2: What is the role of (a) dependency, (b) inner plantation, and (c) plantation pedagogy in the edutocracy theory?

My thought processes provided clarity and context for the methodology. In my attempt to develop the edutocracy model, I started with Denny’s (2020) description. The analyses of the varying documents then led to the three categorizations. At that stage, I began to analyze WI education failure through the lens of dependency theory, aspects of which I found helpful, but mainly underdeveloped and “binaristic” (Shahjahan, 2011). I therefore added another lens for a “bifocal” view, so I drew on the main tenets of the inner plantation theory. Unlike Brathwaite’s (1975) socio-cultural conception, however, my view was inclined toward a socio-psychological construct which shaped a colonial imagination (London, 2002) through school curriculum and pedagogy that voluntarily kept Afro-WIs encaged in what I deem “the plantation of their minds.” This strategy of engaging the second theory helped augment the framework for edutocracy, but still felt as though I were working on top of the educational surface by emphasizing tangible constructs like schools, curriculum, and pedagogy. At this juncture, I decided to work backward by looking at the educational practices emanating from these tangibles and mapping them on to the ideologies/assumptions which underpin them. To achieve this, I used the third lens, the trifocal lens, of plantation pedagogy theory. It is at this point that the edutocracy model began to take firmer shape, as less of a tangible and more of an abstract ideological educational construct.

WI Education and Dependency Theory

Dependency theory, as popularized by Argentine economist Raul Priebisch in the 1950s, started as an underdevelopment theory to explain the persistent poverty of poor countries (Ferraro, 2008). Best (1968) expounded on this work to explain the plantation economy. It was further expanded to provide a framework for answering the larger question of why some countries become rich (center), while others remain poor (periphery; Romaniuk, 2017). An answer was attempted by examining three major characteristics, namely, globalization in the context of dominance versus dependence, impact of external forces on the economic activity of the dependent states, and the relationships between the center and the periphery based on historical patterns and dynamics (Romaniuk, 2017). Despite some theoretical variations, the fundamental argument holds that poor countries are exiled to the periphery and would never develop if they remain enslaved to the rich nations of the center (Velasco, 2002). The application of this theory to education is represented by Figure 1.

Figure 1.

A model of educational dependency.

Figure 1 shows some key assumptions about dependency in education. The theory assumes that peripheries and centers only occur at the macroeconomic level between countries, so the relationship is seen as strictly economic. However, the periphery-center dynamic may not be economic, and it may exist within a single territory. If a macroeconomic lens provides the sole view to the relationship between two countries, the picture can become skewed, presenting a perspective of advantage taking by the so-called center versus mismanagement or something else by the periphery. To clarify this point, I examine the work of Ahiakpor (1985), writing about Ghana, a former colony. He presents a perspective beyond economics, into the psychology of local elites that assists in better understanding the educational problem at the microlevel. Ahiakpor asserts that because the local elites measure success and status by the degree to which they identify with foreign cultural tastes, their cultural ties tend to be outer directed. Resultantly, the local elites in the periphery territories keep their countries poor for their own personal comfort and to maintain the status quo. This theory elucidates a major point about the education system in vulnerable WI states. Local elites, as the decision-makers, have little economic incentive to reform an educational system which works in their favor. They understand that colonial education was not developed for nation building (Westfield, 2012), but individual successes, so it becomes difficult to persuade this small successful group to subsume their personal consumerist needs to national development needs (Mohok-McLaughlin & Hickling-Hudson, 2005). Having had access to a Western tertiary education, an indigenous elite, the globocrat, whose goals are compatible with the metropole capitalists is produced (“A Special Report on Global Leaders,” 2011). An elite which is outerdirected, fuelled by an addiction for foreign goods and services (Bewaji, 2008) oriented to admire Western values (Westfield, 2012), at the enviable comfortable center is unlikely to commit to national goals (Mohok-McLaughlin & Hickling-Hudson, 2005) like quality education for the disadvantaged. A purely economic dependency theory misses this crucial dynamic. It ignores the role the thinking of the “monied educated decision-making centre” plays within the periphery territory, in understanding the failure of WI education, because its view does not extend beyond that economic lens.

The reasons for the WI education failure cannot be captured solely through the lens of an economic dependency theory; otherwise, the system’s failure becomes reduced to an investment or resource struggle in an underdeveloped nation. Logically, however, once that investment is acquired, and the funding and resources accessed, then the educational problem should be solved, if the nature of the problem is purely economic, but that is hardly ever the case. Despite 30% of education aid accessed through EU institutions by Anguilla in 2011, and 21% from similar sources by Dominica (T. Jules & Williams, 2016), these WI territories still face educational issues of similar proportion (high failure rates) to other WI counterparts who did not receive aid. Admittedly, when educational problems are analyzed through the microscope of economics, solutions will be monetized. This means more borrowing and debt for vulnerable economies, appearing to support the economic dependency theory. It is true that when faced with educational hurdles, WI technocrats tend to “outsource” the solutions by hiring foreign Western consultants, purchasing Western technologies and resources, and applying for Western funding to finance remediation programs. I caution though that to brand this, a case of plain economic dependency is simplistic. Beneath the surface, this may speak to a view of the African self, through the lens of education. This is a view of the African self, comparatively speaking, as deficient in knowledge, skills, and expertise to solve their own cultural problems. My thinking is not without basis, as Bewaji (2008) also asked, “If we do not know that we are descendants of great cultures but believe in inferiority of coloureds, how are we to be inward looking when it comes to solving our national problems by ourselves?” (p. 14). Because this theory focuses on economic dependency in a discourse surrounding economic deficiency and plenty, power and powerlessness, advantage and disadvantage on a road to economic self-reliance for the periphery, the social, cultural, educational, and psychological independence gets lost in the discourse as an integral part of self-reliance. The theory therefore makes a faulty assumption that educational dependency necessarily follows from political and economic dependency (Watson, 1984/2012), and as such, that educational independence is a corollary of political and economic independence. However, there are tertiary educational institutions within the periphery which can boast of being independent centers in the globalized world. Take for example, the University of the West Indies, predominantly funded by local “periphery” governments, which according to the World University Rankings is ranked #1 in the Caribbean, within the top 2% in Latin America and the top 4% in the world, which suggests that educational dependence and economic dependence are not always intertwined. When applied to education in underdeveloped WI states, the theory reveals that peripheries in a global scenario can function as centers internally (Altbach, 2009), so that even the labeling is problematic.

The theory makes some contributions to the WI education discourse despite its flaws. It demonstrates how underdeveloped countries can become indebted to developed nations through the lure of educational aid, which become a quid pro quo in exchange for implementation of metropolitan policies and practices rejected in Western lands, such that WI territories become “a knowledge dumping ground for international ideas” (Bristol, 2010, p. 173) where donors’ wishes prevail (Mohok-McLaughlin & Hickling-Hudson, 2005). Still, the theory invokes the notion of unilateral, unidirectional dependency. A wider lens contributes to an expanded view of a codependent relationship. The periphery is not always led along as a subordinate, just as “recipients of colonial education were not merely dupes . . . the uptake by indigenous recipients of colonial schooling . . . varied, ranging from alienation and dislocation for many, opportunities for employment and influence for the few” (Enslin, 2017, p. 3). Some in the lesser developed states, Noah and Eckstein (1988) argue, are perfectly willing to follow the center, though in my estimation, not as mere manipulated pawns, but because they reason that attachment to the center means survival, progression, and ultimately self-reliance. It cannot be assumed, as does this theory, that accepting educational aid means eternal indebtedness. The goal of self-reliance may require aid; however, the problem comes when the goal of self-reliance is not made clear (Omata, 2017) on the road to educational independence.

The “binaristic” perspective (Shahjahan, 2011) as espoused by the dependency theory oversimplifies the WI education failure as one of pure economics. To understand the nature of the problem, one must delve into the historical genesis and continuity of dependency that still plays out in contemporary classrooms (Bristol, 2010). There can be no consideration of school reform outside the history and context of education problems (Jones, 2005). To respond to the practice of education, we must first examine our history (Lavia, 2012). Bearing all this in mind, I will examine the socio-psychological impact of colonial history, a revision of Brathwaite’s (1975) “inner plantation,” on the practice of WI education as an added layer of explanation for the WI educational failure. This second lens provides further insight into the complexity of education issues beyond the view of a system functioning as a replica of the economic plantation or a dichotomous transactional interaction, to that of a complex “inter-structure” of lateral and diagonal relationships (Brathwaite, 1975).

WI Education and the Inner Plantation

This section focuses on how the concept of the “inner planation” influences the way many Afro-WIs have historically seen themselves as they interact with the creolized educational institution. This may lend insight into why the system fails to cater to the majority needs.

Brathwaite (1975) describes the inner plantation as a creolization process which results over distinct periods of time (settlement, slavery, postemancipation, and new immigration) as different ethnic groups come into contact with the African. He depicts the inner plantation through a socio-cultural lens as the interaction between the outer plantation (physical structure) and the inner plantation, the moment at which the social being meets the creole institution, in this case, the education system. Brathwaite contends that because research has overemphasized the outer physical plantation, its constitutional and economic relationship with the metropole researchers missed an opportunity to investigate the inner plantation, that is, the cultural life and expressions of ordinary people on the plantations. Interestingly, he does not present the interactions of the inner plantation dichotomously, as does the dependency theory, but rather as a fluid, sometimes ambiguous creolization process, hence describing the relations between the social being and the creolised institution as an interstructure or a series of complex interactions of lateral and diagonal relationships.

Brathwaite’s socio-cultural lens offers a unique but limited view of the WI education system as a creole institution in Barbados. Unlike the dependency theory, it compels us to look at the historical process of creolization (the point of impact between the different ethnic groups) as part of the education narrative. Uniquely, it demonstrates how a research focus on the outer plantation produced a solely pessimistic discourse around an economic narrative of hegemony, subordination, exploitation, and subjugation, as though the sum total of Afro-WIs’ lived experiences was embedded in slavery. Undeniably, the outer plantation narrative is truthful and factual, but Brathwaite challenged researchers to “flip the script” or expand on it, by changing the narrators. In this way, the “inner plantation,” authored by the “lived participants,” would reflect a richer discourse beyond the physical plantation to a people-centered, community gathering, socio-cultural space, where institutional and cultural expressions (particularly oral histories) were voiced and interpreted by its own inhabitants in their own words and language. Brathwaite (1975) was advocating for a plantation represented as social art rather than social science. While this approach to the research is commendable, I contend that sharing the oral history of the inner plantation would provide an even more unique and interesting perspective into the socio-psychological realm of this space. It is through this socio-psychological lens that Afro-Barbadian educators can better understand the impact of the colonial miseducation of Afro-WIs. I therefore interpret the inner plantation, not as a socio-cultural construct, but a socio-psychological manifestation of how Afro-WIs internalize, process, and interpret the education they receive in school about self and “other,” and how this internalization and interpretation continually affect Afro-WIs within the creolized education system.

A socio-psychological perspective of the inner plantation presents Afro-WIs as existing in an ambiguous insecure space resulting from interactions with creole institutions like schools. Within the economic-labor-related dynamic of the outer plantation space, Afro-WIs are clear of their roles and interactions at each stage in history. The lines become blurred when Afro-WIs interact with the outer plantation at a social rather than economic level, a role to which they are unaccustomed. Within the socio-cultural space of education, the Afro-WI is introduced to self through a discourse of an “inherited concept of exploitation and institution” which could only result in “social and individual disnomia: dependence, imitation, aggression, lack of initiative, the quashie complex: inhibiting growth, change and the realization of identity” (Brathwaite, 1975, p. 6). Essentially, while the inordinate financial power wielded by the Westerner in the outer plantation puts Afro-WIs at an economic disadvantage, the socio-psychological potency of Western education in the cultural space of the inner plantation serves to keep them at a psychological disadvantage making it easier to maintain economic control of the Afro-WI. The Afro-WI in this “educative” state of flux between the outer and inner plantation has a dimmed prospect of his or her future economic and scholastic roles, roles which should provide a foundation for hope.

Unlike any other creolization institution, education has infected the Afro-WI with a deficiency syndrome. They have inherited a discourse of denigration, humiliation, deficiency, subjugation, and disenfranchisement from the education system. To substantiate this claim, one needs to only look at the detailed and extensive work of Norrel London (2002, 2003) into the impact of colonialism on curriculum and pedagogy in Trinidad and Tobago, which could easily be transposed with other WI nations, given their near identical educational systems and colonial histories. If explored through a socio-psychological lens, one begins to see the effect such a negative narrative can have on the Afro-WI psyche in the education process, providing good analysis for its failure. I wish to use Krashen’s (1985) explanation of the affective filter hypothesis popularized in language education as a means of understanding the educational dynamic for Afro-WI functioning in a European designed educational system. He explains how students’ anxieties, low self-esteem, lack of motivation, and other affective factors cause mental blocks or affective filters that rise to impede language input. This is equally applicable to learning in general. Through a socio-psychological lens, the inner plantation becomes an internal psychological conflict based on how Afro-WI history is presented in devaluing the contributions of the African in the education creolization process. Through this lens, the overtones of this reprehensible history blur undertones of immense strength and dignity which potentially can emerge as a narrative of pride, strength, resilience, innovation, resourcefulness, and perseverance around the African self. Because the education system starts by advancing a deficit model of the African, its descendants’ first encounter with the process tells them that they are lacking, need to be fixed, altered, and refined by virtue of being African. The affective filter rises, impeding curriculum input. Thiong’o (1986) poignantly describes the psychological state of the African navigating the environs of the inner plantation of the mind, while interacting with an education that mimics the ideologies, structures, and processes of the outer plantation. He portrays an anti-education system that causes Africans to see their heritage “as one wasteland of non-achievement [making] them want to distance themselves from that wasteland . . . [making] them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves” (Thiong’o, 1986, p. 3). Lavia (2012) describes this thinking more concisely as “a deeply pervasive ethos of internalised oppression” (p. 13). The inner plantation therefore becomes a painful socio-psychological space in which the past colonized and the postcolonized Afro-WIs reside, and where their educational futures are in danger of remaining if there is no undoing of the damage caused by the historical narrative through a psychological rereading, rewriting, and reinterpretation of events in the education system to show the contributions of the African in the education creolization process.

The impact of the inner plantation on the Barbadian social being in education must be examined in the context of the assumptions underlying the system. Language in education policy in Barbados is a good starting point. No explicit policy exists. The implicit policy in Barbados tends toward the monolingual use of SE in a predominantly bidialectal context. This suggests that SE is the superior language for learning content. Because language cannot be separated from culture, the other assumption is that the values promoted through the school language are superior to that of the indigenous culture’s. Barbadian children entering school with lower levels of English proficiency from lower socio-economic homes are therefore labeled intellectually deficient when measured by SE tests (Darder & Uriarte, 2011) and in many cases, socially unrefined at only being able to speak Barbadian dialect. There is no linguistic or cultural bridge offered to help them across to the target language (TL), so it becomes a case of sink or swim. While some may argue “that it is possible to swim, one needs to realize that the chances of drowning are perhaps stronger” (Zephir, 1997, p. 233). In sinking, the student is made to feel defective, a feeling which is transferred to learning content across the curriculum in this unaccustomed language, so the learner is at constant risk of drowning educationally, submerged by the psychological weight of feeling like an educational failure. To put this in perspective, yearly, some 40% of Barbadian students fail to acquire English language certification (see cxc.org), yet, any insinuation that they can acquire the TL through mother tongue instruction is viewed as absurd, as exemplified in an interview with some Barbadian teachers. Mrs C, for example, stated that Barbadian, and by extension WI dialects, are confined to our territories and so to use them in schools would cause students to lose out globally, so when we teach them this (referring to the dialect), they can only go as far as the local airport she says. Ms A within this group interview adamantly agreed, arguing that children need to learn English to communicate world wide (Ms A, Mrs C, personal interviews, May, 2002). Their reaction is telling because learning SE was never called into question; how we could help students acquire it more successfully was the issue. The assumption therefore is that we learn SE through SE even at the expense of high failure rates and poor language competency. This is despite systematic studies showing that the stigmatized variety in formal education has a positive effect on acquiring the standard (Siegel, 2007). Rather than be guided by the linguistic science over the decades, educational decision-makers choose personal and social illogic, rooted in ideologies of supremacy, legitimacy, and superiority of European language and culture to manage the WI education system.

As a part of the community, Afro-WI teachers operate within the ambit of ambiguity in the inner plantation. In this ambiguous space, lip service is paid to the “rich” cultural remnants of the African languages we speak, but in action, we are first and largely being shaped for the “global village” through the global link language English as expressed by Ms A and Mrs C. Through the lens of inner plantation theory, we see an education preparing the Afro-WI for global citizenship, outside the walls of the outer plantation, when he or she has not yet learned how to navigate the spaces and instititutions within the walls of the inner plantation, still inside the outer plantation. A visionary education policy would show understanding of the psychological trauma of the inner plantation; hence, demonstrating that on a path to global citizenship, WIs must first be taught how to become native citizens through an education of self, through their language, owned history, and culture. They must first be inner directed before they move and grow outward in a healthy way beyond the trauma of the outer and inner plantation. Refusal to confront their language assumptions and ideologies means that educationalists fail to build bridges that help students reach the TL, a language that gives learners access to the code for unlocking the curricula’s content on which they are assessed. These refusals become the barriers to helping students develop a sense of confidence in the learning process, in their own intellect, in their culture, in their institutions, and in themselves, necessary ingredients for educational success. The failure of the system is in its belief of the ideology of Western superiority which purports that there is a monolingual, monocultural path to achieving the goal of global citizenship, a path which demands that Afro-WIs bypass the African contributions of African culture in the education process of the Afro-WI child. It is simply paradoxical. The unquestioned yet indefensible assumptions underlying language education are but one example of how the education system fails its students when examining WI education through the theoretical lens of the inner plantation.

The inner plantation theory can therefore be read as a cultural narrative around self-identity, bound up in Afro-WI view of their self-worth (psychology) as they interact with creole institutions, like school. For those who find schooling, which they equate with education, overwhelmingly challenging, there are serious implications for their self-efficacy and self-sufficiency (economics) later in life. In addition, within the institution of school, there are many areas of ambiguity which become zones of psychological conflict for the learners interacting with this system. Like the dependency theory, the inner plantation theory purported by Brathwaite (1975) as a socio-cultural construct provides some insight into WI education failure, but its contributions are limited without an added psychological dimension. Indubitably, neither the dependency nor the inner plantation theories can on their own adequately explain the system’s failure; however, together, they present some meritorious economic and socio-cultural/psychological perspectives. The real issue surrounding the educational debate, however, has to do with why WI education continues to assume its colonial shape. A look through yet another lens, plantation pedagogy, adds more dimension to the discussion, from the educational perspective itself.

WI Education and Plantation Pedagogy

Plantation pedagogy is a theory of education espoused by Bristol (2010). It is described as an inherited educational practice which manifests as both a practice of hopelessness (oppression) and hope (subversion) in the postcolonial context (Bristol, 2010, p. 167), organized around a meta-principle of bureaucratic efficiency. Its practices

minimise the value of indigenous knowledge, reduce the intellectual practice of the teacher to that of implementer and obscures history and culture as influencing features in the persistence of a relationship of ideological reliance upon super-states like the USA and Great Britain. (Bristol, 2010, p. 172)

Like my own work, plantation pedagogy is located within the theoretical spaces of dependency theory and plantation economy (Best, 1968; Levitt, 2005). According to Bristol (2010), as a practice of hopelessness, plantation pedagogy is rooted in hegemony (imposed educational policies), hierarchy (top-down bureaucratic structures and practices), and masquerade (Black practice of Whiteness). By ignoring this backdrop in the education reform process, the plantation model of education for Afro-WIs, like other African descendants, has been allowed to dominate (Jones, 2005).

Plantation pedagogy engages in a discursive practice of hegemony (Bristol, 2010), but more than the discourse surrounding the pedagogy is the pedagogical practice of hopelessness. As a practice of hopelessness, plantation pedagogy is characterized by teaching techniques aimed at developing a colonial imagination (Bacchus, 2006; Kanu, 2006, 2007; London, 2002; Rizvi, 2000). London (2002) describes the colonial imagination not just as a result, but a process. The result is “an aggregate sense shared by a group of people, a community that comes to feel and believe reality together and to experience it in similar ways” (p. 96), best achieved through the school and its curriculum shaping impressionable minds in a single space, the classroom, concurrently. Plantation pedagogy resembles curriculum-driven schooling which creates a level of consciousness activated by a hegemonic pedagogy (Chisholm, 2015), that is, practices, expectations, values, and meanings that over time work to saturate the consciousness of those who are schooled (London, 2002, p. 98), such that they come to have an almost identical sense of reality (Williams, 1973). WI plantation pedagogy therefore trains students, through drilling exercises, to regurgitate information for the purpose of passing high-stakes exams like SSEE and CXC. The result is an unwitting or willing acceptance of distributed knowledge as “cultural legitimacy” (London, 2002, p. 98). This process is referred to by London (2002) as mindless education. It is characterized by a methodology of recitation and rote work which does not “allow for or encourage understanding of what was committed to memory,” but serves the “colonial desire to throttle creativity and critical thinking in the education of the ‘other’” (p. 113). This basis for such practice was exemplified centuries previously by King Leopold (1883, as cited in Westfield, 2012) of Belgium, who instructed missionaries in Africana states to teach the children to read but not to reason while insisting on total submission and obedience. Referred to as mental discipline, this methodology is widely employed in WI schools; Barbados is no exception. Underlying the practice is the assumption generations of WI teachers hold, that education is a predominantly academic exercise. Such exercise seeks to promote a “monoculture of the mind” which serves to maintain control over knowledge production (Shahjahan, 2011, p. 189). It teaches people, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, to think alike, particularly about acceptance of the status quo. This brings us back to London’s point about imagination as an aggregate rather than an individual construct. The greater number of people that think similarly about conditions of disparity, even when it is to their disadvantage, the easier it is to maintain the status quo.

Plantation pedagogy is inextricably linked to the inner planation and dependency theories through the colonial ideology of Western superiority and African inferiority. As a teacher, I have observed that Afro-Barbadian children on interacting with the plantation model of education, the school, construct a view of self “that would develop in them a voluntary subservience . . . and a willingness to continue occupying their positions on the lowest rungs of the occupational and social ladder” (Bacchus, 1994, p. 308). Through the plantation pedagogy lens, an indoctrination of the deficiency syndrome into Afro-Barbadian students implanted by schools comes into sharp focus, comparable to the psychological conflicts existing within the ambiguous space of the inner plantation. Like the psychology of the African self as represented by the inner plantation, the practice of plantation pedagogy annihilates WI children’s sense of belief in their intelligence and abilities. The academic offering of education, which only prepares students for further academic studies or office work, sees many students, not confident in their academic abilities, dropping out (Westfield, 2012). The message communicated is that Afro-WI students who fail to acquire the Western standard of success in school are educationally and socially inferior, fit only for menial labor. Such messaging is permissible because, like the main characters of the dependency and inner plantation narratives, educationalists in the reform process overemphasize the outer plantation, schooling, and grades as external markers of success. Plantation pedagogy as the mastery of schooling and assessment therefore supports the colonially inherited practice of overtesting and high-stakes assessment to rank and file people (D. Jules, 2015; Shahjahan, 2011) and ultimately to decide the likely shape of their future. In dependency terms alone, this kind of education would be viewed as preparation “to produce students for white collar jobs in the tradition of the colonial system . . . based on western values” (Westfield, 2012, p. 2). However, an amalgam of these three theories illuminates an anti-education which through plantation pedagogical practices promotes economic and intellectual exploitation of the periphery, the socio-economically vulnerable of the Afro-WI communities, which causes them to see self as consumers, not innovators, who are desirous of a “better,” Westernized life, removed from the nonscientific, traditional life of the indigenous community. Schooling in the West Indies, and certainly in Barbados through the plantation pedagogy lens, teaches Africana students that academic success is the foundation for true success, which is equivalent to a Western lifestyle marked by the acquisition of luxury items and comforts.

Bristol’s (2010) plantation pedagogy is realistic though limited in explaining the failure of the WI educational system. In fairness, its focus is on teaching specifically and so there is little to be said in the way of criticism as to how her theory unfolds; nevertheless, the classroom focus proves too narrow for this more expansive debate. Education begins long before the teacher and the classroom. It is encoded in policy and curriculum planning and development well above and before the ground level (teaching practice). In this work, therefore, plantation pedgagogy becomes extended to what is taught implicitly in society to the Afro-WI as a social being (societal education), which is then translated and reinterpreted into education policy, planning, and practice by Afro-WIs themselves. WI students of all social classes implicitly learn through explicit policy and practice that education serves to increase opportunities and influence for the privilege few (Enslin, 2017) who concur to walk on the path with the metropolitan guide to maintain the status quo. To achieve this, assessment becomes centered in WI education to identify future candidates of social and political leadership through ranked scores, while supporting the global market ideology of competitiveness and capitalism (Au, 2016; Shahjahan, 2011). The Afro-WI falsely learns through policy and practice that education promotes objective knowledge, because knowledge is neutral (Shahjahan, 2011), though paradoxically, only Western knowledge is deemed scientifically accurate and rational, while some sciences in Asia and Africa, for example, are shrouded in mythology and metaphor (Baber, 1996). This further contributes to ranking types of knowledge and intelligence communities around the world, as explained by Grosfoguel (2007) who says that by hiding the location of the subject of enunciation “European/Euro-American colonial expansion and domination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior knowledge and, thus, of superior and inferior people around the world” (p. 214). Through the plantation pedgagogy lens, Western style education has compelled Afro-WI states to accept an ideology of Western education superiority such that within WI education “content, language, and conceptions of knowledge [are] both unreflectively European and dismissive of indigenous culture, languages, knowledge, and traditions of upbringing and education” (Enslin, 2017, p. 2). Furthermore, the fallacy continues that such “superior” education only allows for the success of a few WIs, who are by virtue of mastering this education, also deemed superior, at least, intellectually.

Some may argue that if WI education is presented as a colonizing tool, then at some level, all WI people are colonized by schooling regardless of ethnicity. To some extent, this is true; however, Tikly (2004) in his research suggests that the curriculum and pedagogy in these low income states like the West Indies are more detrimental to lower classes because their content and practice perpetuate the social disparities. It is this potent mix of plantation pedagogy ideology combined with the psychological conflict within the ambiguous space of the inner plantation that makes the outcome more detrimental to the African descendant who is struggling to understand his or her place in the European model school through an education deficit lens of the African. Through this deficit lens, WI plantation pedagogy becomes the realization of inner plantation thoughts of inferiority playing out in the educational arena. Plantation pedagogy highlights how Afro-WIs truly see themselves in relation to others through the window of that abstract ambiguous space (inner plantation) while functioning in the concrete creolised educational place, the school. The struggle to understand their place while tackling the “foreignness” of their education becomes another mental battle for the Afro-WI that takes up psychological space intended for learning content. The failure to “acquire an education” therefore occurs because the priority for the average Afro-WI in a European education system operating in the West Indies is learning how to survive (avoid drowning) as opposed to learning content.

Plantation pedagogy conceptualized by Bristol (2010) as a practice of hopelessness is clearly observable in the WI context in the outcomes of a high percentage of poor grades and uncertified school leavers, drop-outs, and inadequate literacy and numeracy proficiency (K. Smith, 2020b); however, plantation pedagogy in the Bristol (2010) model lacks specifics as to what practice of hope (real reform) resembles. This is perhaps deliberate, as little has been cohesively recorded in the research around this narrative from a consolidated perspective of practitioners, researchers, students, policy makers, parents, and grassroots community members. This is the section which needs to become part of the reform we crave, an education model which inspires and delivers hope. Admittedly, I do not yet know what that looks like, but in bringing edutocracy to life on the page, I bring it alive in my own understanding and that of others who “see” their privilege and their guilt, who understand their culpable input in the continuity of the broken WI education system, despite their own successes within this system (M. D. Gill, personal communication, September 28, 2020).

Conclusion

To answer the research questions, individually each theory is helpful though limited in answering the “why” of WI education failure. In combination, however, they assisted in developing the more expansive education theory of edutocracy which presents a partial view of the system’s failure as one of ignoring socio-historical context and colonial ideologies underpinning the system which could serve to inform the fundamental problems of WI education. These theories have therefore assisted this work in two ways. First, they have provided a starting point for an assessment and explanation of the WI education failure. Second, their merits and demerits were a basis for constructing the broader yet more consolidated theory of edutocracy in visual form by filling in the theoretical gaps left by these singular theories. They show that WI education, even in the face of reform, is a practice of continuity rather than change because it preserves the plantation model of education (Levitt, 2005). The issue is that the expressed purposes of WI education are at odds with its explicit practices, suggesting a need to work backward and uncover what these practices imply about the educational theories and ideologies which underly them. Likely, these gaps between theory and practice stunt WI educational progress because practice becomes little more than labor in service to another form of plantation society (Bristol, 2010, p. 167), when in reality “children cannot learn and adults cannot thrive in school systems that are run like plantations” (Jones, 2005, p. 22). On the surface, failure of the WI education system manifests as high failure rates in standardized tests, low levels of language proficiency of school leavers, and years of school training which do not meet societal needs for the majority. In the context of current reform, it is less about how the system fails and more about why, to reach the source of the failure. To treat the source of that failure, it must first be identified (its form, function, and impact). In this work, I developed the theory of edutocracy as a way of partially identifying the core of the WI educational failure and explaining that failure beyond the obvious. A theory of edutocracy therefore speaks to how colonial, plantocratic ideology shapes attitudes toward the purpose of WI education; attitudes in turn influence policies that emerge as curriculum, inform teaching practice, and affect learning outcomes. Edutocracy therefore identifies the genesis of the WI educational failure as the deleterious colonial plantocratic ideologies which grounds the system. It also identifies refusal to contextualize education reform within a socio-historical framework for current educational enlightenment, as yet another source of the WI education failure, so nothing changes if nothing changes. Cooper et al. (2004, as cited in Jones, 2005, p. 9) explain that the failure to adequately consider the forces of history and context leads to a poor conceptualization of the policy process. Still, they maintain that repeatedly, policy “solutions” are offered that ignore the history and context of education problems, presenting them as if new and discovered. This attitude is the crux of the WI education failure.

Edutocracy also brings into focus a skewed conceptualization of education. It presents education as schooling and assessment and schooling as teaching, but paradoxically not learning in the sense of understanding and applying, but rather internalizing, memorizing, and regurgitating for exam purposes. In Figure 2, edutocracy is shown as a theory of dependency on Western ideas, knowledge, services, systems, and policies based on ideologies of intellectual hegemony, academic power, and legitimacy of imperial knowledge (Bristol, 2010). It is also a socio-psychological theory which candidly illustrates the impact of the interactions between Afro-WIs and the creole education institution as part of their inner plantation cultural experience. Finally, edutocracy emerges as a theory of plantation pedagogy, more expansively, plantation education, where through its lens the frame is filled with top-down, imposed foreign interests and input plans and policies, aimed at dominating the practice of WI education. The theory brings into sharper focus, edutocracy as educational committees with little teacher representation, policies at odds with context, such as monolingual SE education for primarily nonstandard dialect speakers, ill-fitted cultural educational training materials, and tweaked assessment protocols which encourage continuity (ranking and categorizing) rather than change (equity and egalitarianism). In summation, edutocracy is a theory of how the practice of WI education preserves an “educated bourgeoisie, [who] would be content to take on the role of business agent for the West, accumulating wealth, supporting ethnic interests, and behaving like the former colonizer, complicit in neo-colonialism” (Enslin, 2017, p. 6), the new Afro-WI plantocracy.

Figure 2.

Model of edutocracy.