Dear Editor,
A letter by Mortimer George in Kaieteur News of August 2 refers. He castigated the West Indies Cricket Board on the poor showing of our Test squad.
I hold no brief for the West Indies Cricket Board or its subsidiary boards. But I think that the dismal performance of the Region’s Test teams over the past decade, and as underscored a few days ago when India bowled them out on home turf for just over a hundred, is much more fundamental than Mortimer proffers. Without being overly disparaging, the psychological make-up of those players selected for West Indies Test duty cannot be significantly improved by the boards’ programmes because most of these players lack the mental foundation and acuity for long periods of concentration which Test cricket demands. And that foundation cannot be developed by either the local boards or by the West Indies Board. This is also seriously applicable to Guyana.
The boards cannot unlearn our Test players. I would wager that very few of our current Test players have at least three first class centuries to their credit. But they are representing us at the Test level. I would wager, further, that 50% of our Test squad would not have gone beyond high school. Check the CVs of Test players of other nations and a different picture appears.
The real culprit is the Region’s education system. The CXC administrators have turned secondary education into a collective prison camp and money machine. Why must a child, 12 years of age, have to be at ‘lessons’ from 7 in the morning until after 8pm, Mondays to Saturdays ‒ even on Sundays?
And he has to endure this for about three years because he wants to pass 15 or 20 subjects. We are breeding academic but largely dysfunctional robots. Our schools focus more on academic statistics rather than on human development. What time does this child have for sports and other exposures which build a rounded psyche and gear him for the rough and tumble of the true world?
Oh, those gadgets which are the in-pocket mentors of our young!
I know that some schools will respond that they built the foundation and potential for more doctors and lawyers, etc. But when we were writing 8 subjects at GCE, were we not doing the same, and of better quality than quantity? Does it surprise anyone that those same old eight core GCE subjects have been cut up into about twenty sub-subjects, to write which parents virtually go broke?
There was a time when every school, primary schools included, had a little playfield. That has disappeared. And our roads have too many vehicles for the kids to play on the side roads as in our time. The school yard was the breeding ground for our ten-year-olds in cricket, athletics, football, etc. Each school had a games master. Community centres were a second stage in the process. These ‘human foundation infrastructures’ have to return. Don’t bash the cricket boards! They are not responsible for the disappearance of those pillars. That is a function of our education system.
The sad reality today is that many of our sports men/women are on the financially poor side. Many have not been able to advance their academic standing, they show some promise in sports, they are what is available, so they get called up. Do we expect them to deliver when their mental and psychological endurance are actually tested? An underdeveloped mental seed in the formative years becoming a top producer later is more the exception than the rule. So, the boards inherit, in large measure, the best of what is available. This best, however, is way below par for the course.
In management, it is termed the ‘Peter principle’.
Back up to the time when the West Indies team had pride of place and examine the sociological make up of our players vis-à-vis the education system at the time. Children, including Mortimer, had time and opportunity to become rounded persons.
I am hopeful that the recent utterances of the Minister of Education can take root in our country so that we can once more ‘humanise’ our children. Let them be allowed to live, and relate, and develop ‘street sense’, and be fertile seeds for all-round higher endeavours so that the reservoir from which we draw can become deeper and better.
Yours faithfully,
Taajnauth Jadunauth
