A Culture Valuable in the World

 By Ian McDonald

In 1991 and 1992 when I was working with the West Indian Commission a feature of many of the presentations made by scores of experts and academics and businessmen and educators was how often they cited other countries as influences we needed to recall or examples we should strive to emulate. The Commission was constantly hearing about a dominant American influence, the New Europe, the Japanese example, the dynamic image of the Asian tigers, the Singapore model. Now, of course, people enthuse over the world-shaking dynamism of China and India.

During the Commission hearings years ago I remember after a while wondering if all the experts were overdoing it a bit since I was quite sure very few of the presenters really found the ways of life in most of these countries preferable to our own. Did we, then, have nothing for others to emulate?