Secondary Students and Principals' Aspirations for Youth in Trindidad and Tobago.Dr Jo Milne-Holme, Faculty of Education, Unversity of Western Sydney. AbstractThe generation gap has often been described as a generalisation gap. Research conducted in Caribbean schools found that student perceptions of education and the future of the nation showed interesting differences. Young people were often described as confident, materialistic, self-centred and embedded in ideas carried in the America media. They were contrasted to adolescents of the 50s and 60s as being less serious about religion and traditional education. In many respects there were given an image that was negative in comparison to the youth of yesterday. However, an analysis of the aspirations of contemporary youth revealed a very different set of characteristics. Young people talked about their fears and the destruction of their island home by corrupt or incompetent politician; their anxiety about an outmoded education that was not connected to the globalization of a media aware generation; their sadness at the narrowness of racial intolerance that persists and the devastation visited on the islands by foreign 'invaders'. The stories were of loss and of threats of further loss rather than the arrogant voices of young people who would inherit the bounties of that nation state. This presentation will be about the voices of two generations and how these voices are part of education and local identity in the Caribbean. |
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