When I was a child in the 1950?s, the Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Methodists dominated the primary and secondary school system. There were Baptist and Salvation Army primary schools, but only the Catholics, Anglicans and Methodists had secondary schools, none of which were in the districts. The first government high school was the Belize Technical College, established in 1952, and the spectacular academic successes achieved by the Technical College are well documented. The fact that Technical was not preaching any kind of denominational religion to its students does not seem to have caused their graduates to be more immoral than the graduates of the church-ruled high schools.

Let me tell you about my personal experience with church education. I attended Roman Catholic schools because my father was a Roman Catholic. Of the five living children of his parents, my father, the eldest, was the only child baptized as a Roman Catholic. I would say more than half of my father?s adult friends were non-Catholic. My father married a Methodist, but the marriage was conditional on all the children of the union being raised as Roman Catholic. And so we were. In my case, I went to Holy Redeemer Boys School from 1952 to 1959, St. John?s College from 1959 to 1963, and St. John?s College Sixth Form from 1964 to 1965.

When I began Holy Redeemer in 1952, my verbal skills were above average. The educational system in the 1950?s placed excessive emphasis on reading and writing, and so I became an academic star at Holy Redeemer and St. John?s College. The pressure of high expectations descended upon me, but, worse than that, it appears that the priests made plans for my life based on their own church interests.

The fact of my having a Methodist mother who refused to convert to the Catholic religion, no doubt affected my perspective on life and religion. All of my mother?s people were non-Catholic.

In retrospect, I realize that the way I was treated at the high school and the junior college changed after I rejected the priesthood offer at the age of 15, which would have been around 1962. I feel now that I had been receiving special treatment before then. If I took that special treatment for granted at the time, if I assumed that it was just the way things were, remember, brothers and sisters, I was just a child.

As my life began to change with respect to those who were my educators and church-appointed mentors, I myself was becoming a young man, and I had a family code of how it was that a man should behave. The circumstances under which I received an American State Department scholarship in early 1965 were controversial. The chief priest in the matter tried to prevent my receiving the scholarship. In other words, I barely got out of British Honduras in August of 1965.

My personal rebellion was in reaction to phenomena like the Vietnam War and the black power struggle in the United States during my time in school there, but the main thing in my life was the fact that I believed that I had been miseducated in Belize. I had been misled by people whose credibility derived from the fact that they were supposed to be representing God on earth.

My behaviour on my return home was my personal attempt to prove to myself that I could have made something of myself without the religious education imparted by foreigners who had betrayed me. I suppose this was a wild goose chase, because there were skills that I possessed which had been derived from their training. But those were years of great stress, and I was defending my manhood and my personal reality. I read stuff that I wrote during those years, and today some of it sounds egotistic, adventurist, and arrogant. But it was how I felt at the time. And I?m explaining to you that I had gone through a process of betrayal, betrayal which was inflicted on a child in the name of God.

The force of religion in defining us as young men in this secondary school system was remarkable. During the UBAD years, for instance, I met other young men, contemporaries who had gone to the Anglican and Methodist high schools, and even though we shared almost all black conscious beliefs, it has seemed to me that the fact that I was from S.J.C. always prevented us from truly becoming one.

I am more positive today than I have ever been. If we Belizeans do not take denominational religion out of the educational system, then things will just remain as bad as they are, and become worse.

All power to the people.