Dear Editor,

I refer to last week’s student protest at UWI, and the furore of criticism that it has given birth to in the media and other places. For the most part I agree with the generally held belief that the behaviour of a faction of the protestors who chose to react violently was ill-advised.

What I do take umbrage to, however, is the held view that protesting against the UWI’s bureaucratic and under-publicised methods of barring financially compromised students from taking exams is behaviour which is ‘savage’, ‘ghetto’, ‘barbaric’, ‘entitled’, and a number of other pejoratives that have been used to describe the endlessly struggling but also endlessly determined and ambitious Jamaican youth who rightly believe that without education they are effectively crippled.

Despite popular belief, protest action by college students is not an alien concept invented by lowerclass Jamaican adolescents solely to outrage and scandalise our elders, and drive them to bemoan the fact that they we are the scoundrels tipped to be the leaders of tomorrow. Indeed, since early 2011 the same behaviour has been mirrored all around the world — university students in the UK lashing back at government cuts for education to the point where they even mobbed a car carrying Prince Charles; college students in Canada last month clashing with police over proposed hikes in tuition fees; and not to mention the UC Berkley ‘pepperspray’ debacle in the US, where non-violent student protestors suffered police brutality as a direct result of that school administration’s reticence in engaging in balanced and understanding dialogue with their student body about the issue.

But apart from this, some have also responded to the UWI incident with the hackneyed proclamation that tertiary education is a ‘privilege, not a right’, and that if the generation of Jamaicans who are tasked with inheriting this country of ours is to be equipped with the necessary tools to do so and run it effectively, our parents should have saved for it, or we should work to fund it ourselves.

This argument blindly assumes that the average student unable to pay their tuition hasn’t attempted to traverse every option in this desert of opportunities, including searching fruitlessly for a job in a market of rising unemployment and on the background of nothing but a high school education which qualifies you for a corresponding minimum wage. This privilege argument logically dictates that most Jamaicans agree with the idea that this nation can progress while constructing a society where only those precious few with the means to pay for the commodity of knowledge are allowed the right to function on a level playing field with not only our fellow citizens, but with our increasingly global competitors. This is obviously asinine.

Have our steadily rising levels of both poverty and crime not indicated to us what happens to a society which knowingly cultivates sharp socio-economic and class divisions? Those divisions will eventually forcefully overlap. And no smug acknowledgment of ‘pulling oneself up from your bootstraps’ will stem the tide when social anomie erupts, and real savagery and barbarism are seen from those who truly have nothing to lose when it reaches all of our front doors.

A representative from the UWI recently said of the protests that students need to eliminate ’emotion’ from discussions about tertiary education, and focus solely on the business aspect of the issue. And I propose to the Government that this is precisely the point — prioritising education is good business for the well-being of every country, and if Jamaica fails to recognise this simple concept it will be at the peril of us all. Ishena Robinson

ishenarobinson@hotmail.com