Calypso, Education, and Community in Trinidad and Tobago: From the 1940s to 2011

Abstract

This chapter has grown out of an address delivered on January 28, 2009, at a seminar on the theme “Education through Community Issues and Possibilities for Development.” It seeks to explore the foun-dational ideas of Eric Williams,¹ an international scholar and former Trinidad and Tobago prime minister, about education as a vehicle for decolonization through nation-building, most of which he outlined in Education in the British West Indies (1950), a report that, having been prepared under the auspices of the Caribbean Research Council of the Caribbean Commission between 1945 and 1947, he then published in 1950 in partnership with the Teachers’ Economic and Cultural Association (TECA) of Trinidad and Tobago. Drawing heavily upon De Wilton Rogers’s The Rise of the People’s National Movement (1981), this chapter will detail Williams’s association with the TECA and its education arm, the People’s Education Movement [PEM], between 1950 and 1955, when Williams made the transition from research to politics via lectures. It will also explore the issues of education, community, and nation-building during the early years of the People’s National Movement (PNM), and when in his first term in office, Williams struggled to sell his ideas about educational reform and development to a skeptical, and sometimes hostile, hierarchy of entrenched interests.