Misconceptions about secondary schools

By Ralph Jemmott

The second Matthew D. Farley Memorial Lecture was held on November 27, 2025. The topic was Transforming Education For National Development And Global Impact and the address was delivered by Dr Henderson Carter. On that occasion, speaking from the floor after the lecture, Mr Alwyn Adams chose to attribute to me statements that I have never made and would never make. This is the second occasion on which Mr Adams has made the same or similar statements.

The first occasion was when he spoke on the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation ( CBC) call-in programme. I am referring to his claim that I have termed the newer secondary schools in Barbados, former secondary modern, former comprehensive schools “pedagogical dumping grounds”.

The content of the lecture delivered by Carter is posted on YouTube for all to see, including Mr Adams’ comments towards the end before the master of ceremonies had to ask him to conclude.

I have written several articles for the press over the years, many of them on education. Twelve on aspects of schooling are published in my text An Uncommon Currency, published in 2007.

I do not recall ever referring to such schools as “pedagogical dumping grounds” or any such derogatory nomenclature. To the contrary, I have persistently jumped to their defence and the appropriateness of their role in the Barbadian education system at the time when the first two secondary moderns were established at Richmond Gap, St Michael.

The foundation of secondary modern schools such as Parkinson Memorial, Grantley Adams Memorial, St George Secondary, Princess Margaret Secondary and many others constitutes the greatest and most significant legitimate expansion of education in Barbados. And both political parties have constructively pursued that expansion to our collective benefit.

Introduction to teaching

For me to say that Parkinson Memorial School was a “dumping ground” would be to denigrate not only the students I taught there, but, more significantly, the older teachers who were teaching there when I joined the staff in 1963.

Most of those have now gone on, but I recall working with and learning from older people such as Mr Harold G. Massiah, Mr Ernest Weir, Mr Irving Wilson, Mr Winslow Harris, Mr Thorpe, Mr Oscar Griffith, Mrs Farmer, Mrs King, Mr William Niles, Mr Grantley Prescod and, most importantly, Mr James McCollin, to whom I was apprenticed as an assistant teacher in Class 3G or 3 Grammar, having never taught a single class before. Ms Griffith, the music teacher, was the last to pass away.

It was a happy introduction to teaching and I would go on to make it my life career with very few regrets. I enjoyed my four years at Parkinson in the company of a younger cadre of teachers such as Mr Stanley Brooks, Ms Francillia Hunte, Mr Sam Lewis, Mr Clement “Netto” Hinds, Mr Andy Burnett, Mr Pearson Blackman, Mr Vincent Husbands, Mr Stanley Medford, Mr Eugene Pilgrim, Mr John Cumberbatch, Mr Derek Briggs and many more.

For me to say that Parkinson was any kind of dumping ground would negate my year of teaching there and the achievements of the students I taught, particularly of the students in that Class 3G.

I have always said that given what educators call “value added’’, that form 3G at Parkinson Memorial did as well as or better than some of the classes I tutored in my 32 years at Harrison College. With one notable exception they all did well, some exceptionally so. The success of students who attended newer secondary schools is replicated across the school system.

I would like to inform Mr Adams that unless he can find where and when I referred to newer secondary schools as “dumping grounds”, he should cease and desist from making such fallacious utterances. If he persists in so doing, I may have to take legal steps to stop the ignorance parading as wisdom.

An arguably more significant outrage was Mr Adams’ preposterous assertion that Mr John C. Hammond, headmaster of Harrison College, and Mrs Ivy Randall, principal of Queen’s College, two white English-born people, somehow persuaded Grantley Adams, premier of Barbados, to establish secondary modern schools to stop black children from gaining entrance to Harrison College and Queen’s College because they (Hammond and Randall) felt that black children did not have the intellectual capacity to undertake a grammar school education.

This is a gross insult to the man who was one of, if not Barbados’ greatest statesmen, in the 20th century. Why would Grantley Herbert Adams, someone who was in the vanguard of the progressive movement since 1937, take advice from Hammond and Randall on setting up the secondary modern school after 1952 and on the belief that somehow most black Barbadians were intellectually incompetent to undertake a grammar school education?

Grantley Adams himself won a Barbados Scholarship in 1916 and many other black workingclass boys followed. Besides, not every secondary school has to be of the grammar school type.

It would be important to know the source of Alywn Adams’ information on this matter involving Hammond and Randall. Hammond was my headmaster for nine years. He was not without his colonialist assumptions, but I don’t think he was suggesting that Harrison College should remain “white” and Grantley Adams would have totally rejected any such suggestions. I certainly have never heard this before.

National development

It has been suggested that the newer secondary schools were set up as inferior schools or, as Trevor Marshall once contended, they were little more than “glorified primary schools”. The problem is in our thinking. For too long we have privileged academic education over other types of schooling. If a school did not pursue an academic curriculum, we assumed that somehow it must be second rate and the students who attend such must be second rate.

Over the past six months I have employed two craftsmen – one to do electrical work and the other to upholster a three-piece living room suite. I asked each where they went to school and how they acquired such expert skills. Both had attended so-called newer secondary schools and gone on to either the Samuel Jackman Prescod Institute or the Skills Training Programme.

Were they products of educational “dumping grounds”? I would not have a clue how to begin upholstering a living room sofa.

Newer secondary schools were not inferior schools. They catered legitimately to different abilities, all of which are essential to national development.

But that is not all. The former Senator Adams, who likes nothing more than standing before a microphone, said that the current education system in Barbados was “structurally worse” than when it was inherited from the colonial masters. Read that one more time and think. This from a man who twice in a public forum talked about “ignorance masquerading as wisdom”. Is he actually claiming that Barbados has over the decades spent so much national revenue on education only to make it “structurally worse” than before?

I reassert that any deficiencies in contemporary Barbadian education in terms of outcomes relate more to cultural slippage. A seismic redefinition in values has destroyed the foundations on which the educational gains of the past were achieved.

Abolishing the 11-Plus will not make it better. In fact, if we do not implement the Transformational Programme right, it could make things a lot worse. Some of the stories I hear coming out of our schools are frightening.

Ralph Jemmott is a retired educator and social commentator. This article was submitted as a Letter to the Editor.