There are two things we believe we understand about the process which established the Roman Catholic Church, within a century after landing in Belize to attend to the spiritual needs of the Catholic Ladino, Mestizo, and Maya refugees from the 1847 Yucatan Caste War, as the dominant force in the colony’s education system. In the first instance, the yeoman’s work of Garifuna teachers, beginning early in the twentieth century, strengthened the Church’s primary school foundation nationwide to the point where it became the best around. Secondly, the American background of the priests and nuns who ran the Catholic school system was important in the cutting edge decisions they took which eventually made the Anglican school system, by comparison, seem old and backward. Even as the United States replaced Britain as the world’s most modern and powerful economy after World War II, so the American Catholic school system in Belize ran down and passed the British Anglican system.
As in everything else, there were winners and losers here when the Catholics went ahead, and the Anglicans and Methodists dropped behind. The winners, and deservedly so, were the Ladino, Mestizo, Maya and Garifuna Roman Catholics. The losers were the Anglican and Methodist Creoles. At their leadership levels, there were decisions made which did not work out as well as the Catholic decisions. The Creole people, who are mostly Anglicans and Methodists, were not to blame for the holes which began to show up in their school systems. But they were the victims.
Generally speaking, we Belizeans have been reluctant to confront issues in our country which have religious and ethnic implications. In 1969, there was a slope down which Creole people, the Southside Belize City majority, had already begun to slide. There were not that many people here who could see this, so that UBAD’s criticisms of the racism implicit in the Belizean school curricula were successfully, for all intents and purposes, branded as an attempt to import American race problems into Belize.
UBAD, as an organization, went away, but this newspaper did not, and it became Belize’s leading newspaper in 1981, then helped to establish Belize’s first private, commercial radio station in 1989, followed by a television station early in the twenty-first century. Together, these constitute the Southside’s leading media house – Kremandala.
For more than four decades, Kremandala has essentially been saying the things Dr. Herbert Gayle documented last week. The defence against Kremandala’s assertions used by those who felt they had something to lose, has always been and remains, in the main, ad hominem. An unwillingness or inability to debate the real socio-political issues in Belize contributed to our competitor’s fall from no. 1 to no. 2 in 1981. In its editorial last weekend, The Reporter described Dr. Gayle’s report as “amateurish,” and accused the scholar of “gorging himself on generic observations which reveal little that is new.”
The owner/publisher of The Reporter was one of the founders of the ruling United Democratic Party (UDP) in 1973. Today’s Reporter is not as slavishly pro-UDP as it was back then, but it now appears to be slavishly pro-something. What that something is, is for you to figure out, good readers.
We were struck by “The Searchlight” column in last weekend’s issue of The Guardian, the official newspaper of the ruling party. The columnist said, with respect to Dr. Gayle’s research, “The result of his thousands of interviews and months of painstaking work seem merely to confirm what we already knew: the Police Department is a part of the problem instead of a part of the solution and our education system is largely failing in its mission …” Later, the brave columnist declared: “However, the elephant in the room has to be the Church/State system that played an important role in the development of education in Belize but is now in serious need of an overhaul. This is a discussion that must be based on results and not on emotion. The issue is not whether the Churches have a role to play in society but whether they are the best institutions through which to deliver education to the State. It is about economics and competence, control and accountability.”
In our Belizean context, “The Searchlight” column is a remarkable one. It suggests that there is a faction in the UDP which has passed by religious fanaticism and has confronted the fact that the largest population/community in the nation is experiencing violence levels which are the equivalent of a civil war. This is what was established by Dr. Gayle’s report, flippantly and disrespectfully described by The Reporter as “amateurish.”
For sure the vast majority of human beings require spiritual comforting, and this is the most important reason for the vast popularity of religion on planet earth. Historically, however, societies ruled by clerics have experienced various serious problems. Clerics claim to represent supernatural power, which is to say, God, whereas the political power to administrate societies has as its priority the welfare of human beings.
In Belize, the secular politicians have either been in league with the clerics or intimidated by them. This has been most evident in the education system. Those who claim to represent supernatural power have acquired massive power over the schools. In so doing, they have gained the right to influence, yea control, tens of thousands of young Belizean minds every year.
Dr. Gayle’s report has proven that something is wrong where the efficiency of Belize’s education system is concerned. In an incredibly distracted editorial, The Reporter appeared to end by concluding that Belize’s worst problem is marijuana. Marijuana is a leaf which God created and grew upon planet earth. But, let us say, as The Reporter does, that this marijuana is evil. Why can’t Belize’s education system, as patently inadequate as it has now been exposed to be, be criticized? Belize’s education system, we think, was made by man, not God. If the education system is flawed, what does this have to do with God? This is the question we would like for The Reporter to answer.