2013-Jan-31-2017Hrs
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"A Chance At Agriculture Missed.
Curriculum default at Mausica’s teacher training programme
This is a lament for a chance missed by our fine teacher-training institution- Mausica, to teach agriculture to future teachers, to reverse the land abandonment begun in 1838 among the children of Africa who were being educated as teachers..
Trinidad and Tobago had been an agricultural colony for more than one hundred and sixty years when Mausica was carved out of abandoned canefields. Fifty-six acres of land on which houses were built for resident staff, a playing field was carved out, an administration building and lodgings for maintenance equipment and staff erected. The rest of the land remained a “bandan”, a word used to denote abandoned land or land allowed to lie fallow, to recover from previous cultivation, in order to resume cultivation later. Later never came to Mausica..
The college did not acknowledge the fact that some of its students were going to rural schools, where agriculture was important. This institution had a city oriented program, and ignored completely the need to teach rural children to value, treasure and cultivate the land.
In the immediate aftermath of Emancipation in 1838, all former slaves, forced to cultivate other people’s land for free, dropped their tools and walked off the plantation. They preferred the possibility of starving, to going back to work on the land for wages. This resulted in the importation of Chinese labourers, who turned out to be better at setting up laundries and barber shops, than planting cane. Then Indian indentures were imported. They took over the ardous task of sugar cultivation.
It would seem that one of the things we could have done at Independence, was to teach our African young people to love the soil on which they now lived, but the middle class lifestyle of studying academic subjects was the dominant idea, while the nation continued to import its food from places capable of holding us hostage on a whim.
It is true that the Centeno Agricultural Station was nearby, there was another agricultural station at St. Joseph, and the University of the West Indies had the world-famous School of Tropical Agriculture. Mausica, however did not teach planting anything, there may have been a field trip to Centeno, but that, and teaching agriculture are not the same thing,nor did the grounds men take good care of the fifty-six acres. It was as if our students believed that studying academics divorced one from the land on which one lived, and none of the administration did anything to change their minds. The youth who came from country areas to Mausica, also divorced the land from their consciousness.
It was not until the riots and Black Power consciousness of the 1970’s that African people began to return to the land, and to “plant garden” seriously, to eat healthier.
At that time, land was allocated to many who had been landless before, and they headed out to rural areas to rediscover the land, but the opportunity to facilitate that love, at Mausica, was lost, and not recovered.
If the love of the land is not inculcated early, in all our people, we would continue to pave over acres for housing, parking lots and shopping malls, and when the rains come the soil would be washed away to silt up our rivers and gulf.
That happens now with great frequency. Teachers were not educated to see that they had a responsibility, as change agents, to teach a different perspective on land cultivation. They cannot pass on what they did not get, or know.
Mausica, in the curriculum choices it made, relegated the countryside to a place to escape from, rather than a place to feed the nation. This contempt for the land remains a factor of education in Trinidad and Tobago today.
Our current health challenges of obesity, hypertension and diabetes, illnesses connected to wrong eating, could be tied back to the national tendency to buy all our food, imported from elsewhere, dried, dead, and preserved in brine or sugar, rather than to encourage every citizen to grow more of his /her own food.
We wasted more than forty acres, by living on it, hardly cutting the grass and bush, and resisting the urge to plant things, in the mistaken belief that we were too genteel for that. Piano lessons did not go with gardening.
We were so mistaken, but at that time few of us had travelled abroad, and although the grounds at UWI, existing simultaneously with Mausica were kept in immaculate condition, that did not inspire us to do anything with our grounds.
The divorce between various institutions of higher learning, was total. A pity."
Linda Edwards
