Keep our nurses and teachers at home

May 07, 2001

A country's most productive force is its diverse strata of human resources. It takes years of back-breaking, intelligent functioning on the part of educators, nation-builders, professionals etc at all levels to produce the quality and quantity of human labour power to ensure the level of social development necessary at each juncture.

It is the energy and money and time put into the building up of physical and creative infrastructure that guarantee the constant production and reproduction of the human resource levels. That process never comes cheaply. A country pays and pays dearly for the development of its populace.

It is said that it takes the entire infrastructure of a village to produce a grown individual. What does it cost today to produce one nurse, or one teacher? Can that ever be fully quantified? Far less the cost to produce and reproduce thousands of them?

No country can afford to lose in one fell swoop significant numbers of its trained and professionals. That will be the surest way to guarantee stagnation and cultural decline. One will be virtually spinning top in mud. Clearing road for the development of other countries, like clearing road for agouti to run.

We cannot allow our nurses and teachers to go. It is a situation that warrants enlightened social leadership and statesmanship on behalf of our politicians to come up with the kind of package that will keep them home.

No matter what that package may mean in terms of immediate expenditure, it will cost us less to keep them, and the country stands to benefit in the long run. We cannot be myopic in such a crucial and spinal matter.

Dr Barbara Jones, that signal patriot, would turn in her grave if we were to do otherwise. She was the professional agriculturist who was hounded out of T&T because she dared to want to "dirty her hands in the soil of the land" rather than sit at the ministerial desks in St Clair.

And this noted avant garde professional found herself lecturing "to people who did not need her" at McGill University, in the heart of Montreal, Quebec, till the frustration and rejection and marginalisation drove her to the point that she enclosed herself in a laboratory and turned on to the max all the poisonous gas lines. And being who she was, she left us a poem. That is how we came to know now what we know.

It is not a matter to be taken lightly. We have a country and a nation to build. It cannot be left to chance, to happen by "hit and miss" and "voops". Our "ladies of the lamp" and our "disseminators of knowledge" cannot be abandoned and allowed to be sold to the highest bidders.

The brain drain of the late 1960s was a harbinger of the social explosion or the February Revolution of 1970. How many of us remember that? It was the callous disregard for proper compensation packages for people who believed in the dream of independence and national responsibility and who laboured to fulfill that dream and yet could not see their way. When that hope dwindled, people began to leave in droves.

Teachers in particular were offered contracts to work in Canada, albeit in the coldest most withdrawn areas where no one else wished to go, like the backwaters of Saskatchewan and Thunder Bay.

Teachers fresh out of Mausica Training College and GTC took up such contracts abroad to the extent that the then Government of the day had to include a clause in their training agreement binding them to a minimum service period on the local scene.

Many of these people have now retired and are presently returning home. Interviews with them should reveal interesting factors now that we are once again back to a similar scenario.

Today it is the United States and likewise one can be certain that T&T teachers will be posted to the backwoods of the concrete jungles. The mere fact that they are offering "danger money" clearly indicates where our teachers are destined to end up.

The statistics indicate that the US spends some $125 billion on education with results that are no way commensurate with that kind of injection. Ninety-two per cent of the US children attend public schools which get the bulk of this funding, yet 60-63 per cent of the poor whites and the African/Latino-Americans in the Fourth Grade cannot read.

They do not seem to have a clue as to how to proceed. Pitching for T&T teachers is really a grand fishing expedition, hoping to get greater quality at a cheaper rate.

In addition, it appears that special regard is to be given to teachers trained in the "informatics"-information technology-which is the requirement for advancing in context of the present global environment. The USA has a shortage of such teaching skills but T&T is much more in need of that human resource than the US and it will be tantamount to cutting our own throats to allow even one teacher so equipped to leave, far less 200 and 300.

The question is what shall be left for us in this region? "Bananas" soon will be a commodity of the past, thanks to the WTO and the American lobby emanating from the US Fruit Company. "Offshore banking" in the region has also been eliminated by the dictates of the OECD, and "sugar quotas" will soon be in jeopardy owing to the "everything but arms" policy of the European Commission.

We need to find new paths to economic development and the key thrust now is to hold on to our skilled and talented strata who can help prepare the coming generations for the task ahead. As the advertisement says: from where shall our engineers, doctors and economists come if there are no teachers?