Dear Editor,

This year Calabar High School has been celebrating its centenary with a year-long schedule of much-publicised activities. It is an appropriate time to reflect on the long tradition of excellent education in Jamaica and some of the other Caribbean countries such as Barbados and Cuba. Schools such as Calabar with their boarding emphasis until about the 1960s accepted students from the age of 11 or so and over the next six to seven years inculcated not only the required skills of a good secondary education but also qualities of basic decency, civility and public service.

Judging from the list of Calabar Old Boys returning to participate in the school’s signal year and the activities showcased, the school has indeed made a notable contribution to the history of Jamaica in several different spheres of endeavour. Celebrations, however, have a way of magnifying the past at the expense of the present and the future and the present Calabar celebrations appear to be a case in point. Nobody begrudges Calabar its moment of justifiable breast-beating. But the national good demands more.

The various high schools ought to have a combined educational council in which they, along with appropriate government representatives, think perpetually about the changing needs of national education at the secondary level. We need to know what the world will look like in 2112 and how adequately the high schools of that future era will be serving the changed needs of Jamaica.

Marcus Wellstone

Spanish Town

St Catherine