Brain Train : Quality Higher Education And Caribbean Development

The Brain Train is the only dependable vehicle on which Caribbean people can journey deeply into the development culture of postmodernity. Nothing short of an education revolution, located primarily in the higher level of the sector, will be adequate. Mass access to quality higher education – the "Brain Train" – is the Caribbean's last chance to secure sustainable development.

     The brain train must be reversed to a place where the Brain Train can be boarded. This is the best way for Caribbean people to effectively gather and focus their abundant intellectual and creative resources in their continuing flight from poverty, dependency, and to counter the growing post-independence sense of disillusionment.

     The scientific mobilization of the Caribbean sense of self and sovereignty is a precondition for boarding the Brain Train. The creation of a development-oriented mentality within a learning society is the product of the process. The call here is for popular participation in development thinking and action by opening access to all for relevant higher education. Finding the solutions to challenges faced by Caribbean nation states in this phase of glabalization is no simple manner, but the best place to begin the search is on this terrain. The Brain Train is about education and creativity, not certification and validation. It is about the manufacture of creative minds than find fertile expression in the field of the productivist consciousness.

HILARY McD. BECKLES is Professor of Economic and Social History and Vice-Chancellor, University of the West Indies. His many publications include Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide; A Nation Imagined: The First West Indies Test Tour, 1928; and Freedoms Won: Emancipation, Identity and Nationhood in the Caribbean.

Anthony Perry, Programme Officer, Office of the Board for Undergraduate Studies, The University of the West Indies.

Peter Whiteley, Director, Quality Assurance Unit, The University of the West Indies.