Does education begin at home?

By Matthew Woolford

I knew that I would not have been in Trinidad for All Souls Day. As such, and in vigil, I visited the grave of my deceased grandparents, Cecil and Myrtle Williams, at the Lapeyrouse Cemetery on the Sunday before.

It was an easy commute, as I simply walked up Richmond Street, Port of Spain, after Mass had ended at Sacred Heart Church.

Profoundly, yet fittingly, I felt the need to read the copy of that week’s Catholic News which I had in hand, while sitting at their gravesite. The article I read was entitled, ‘The state of T&T’s literacy’, written by Klysha Best. In it, I found some staggering but not overwhelmingly surprising statistics:

• “…Ameen (MP for St Augustine, Khadijah Ameen) believes there has been a continuous decline in performance at the SEA level, stating that only 57.9 per cent of students scored 50 per cent or more in 2024.”
• “ALTA (Adult Literacy Tutors Association) conducted the first National Literacy Survey in 1992… and it found that one in four adults had serious literacy challenges, in that they would not be able to fill out a form beyond writing their name and perhaps their address.”
• “…The UWI survey (1993) went on to determine that less than half of the population—one in two persons, could only read and understand a short newspaper article—almost a paragraph.”

Two reasons for this current, and longstanding situation, as commented by Founder and CEO of ALTA, Dr Paula Lucie Smith, and mentioned within this article were:

1. “…our school system continues to be dominated by the SEA, which drives the curriculum very quickly through the learning stages in primary school. So many children who do not come from a background that is literate or who have some issue, whether it is dyslexia, or some sort of home issue…will simply move through the primary curriculum and move on.”
2. “Not improving in the near future is also the impact of the school closure for two years during Covid and that means that students continue to leave the school system having been impacted by those two years of closure….”

In my opinion, this problem clearly predates the frustrating event that was the Coronavirus pandemic, but I do believe that the first reason mentioned above, echoes what my mother, Lynette Woolford, has preached from time immemorial, and that is that ‘education begins at home’.

My grandparents were not rich, but they were determined. My mother, my aunts and my uncles have repeatedly told me of the critical comments they received from others, about themselves, while growing up.

This ranged from my grandparents ‘having too many children’ to be able to properly take care of all their needs; their perceived poorness or lack of great material accommodation, and a general expectation that not much was to come from them academically or otherwise.

I don’t know who coined the phrase, “A vision without a plan is a daydream, and a plan without a vision is a nightmare”, but what I do know is that my grandparents had both. They never studied Shakespeare at school but, as my mother would say, “…they could check a report card ‘good’.”

On my recent visit to Washington DC, I made it my business to visit the memorials along the National Mall of some of the brilliant men and women who also had a vision and a dream. One of these was the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial. According to Harvard EdX, an online learning platform, “…A fierce advocate of racial and economic justice through nonviolent resistance, Dr King helped to organise pivotal civil rights protests, including the march from Selma to Montgomery and the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his now-famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech …  A brilliant student, he entered Morehouse College at the age of 15; he went on to study divinity at Crozer Theological Seminary and received his PhD in theology from Boston University in 1955.”

I also visited the Lincoln Memorial. According to the National Park Services website, “On this location (the outer platform) in 1963, Martin Luther King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. In the speech, he evoked the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the emancipation of the slaves, and the ‘shameful condition’ of segregation in America 100 years after the American Civil War. The march was a watershed moment for the Civil Rights movement, helping pressure lawmakers to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

I also visited the Thomas Jefferson and Franklyn Roosevelt Memorials respectively.

It feels good to have heroes to look up to. However, I must admit, it feels even better to have known them personally in real life.