Category Archives: Education

Brinsley Samaroo: A Historian of the People

Prof Brinsley Samaroo
Historian and retired lecturer Prof Brinsley Samaroo

By Dr Tye Salandy
July 10, 2023

I first met Brinsley Samaroo many years ago on a radio programme where I brought up an aspect of race relations in Trinidad and Tobago that I thought his explanation was missing. He agreed with me, and we spoke for a long time following the programme. Since then we would talk closely over the years, and he would give me books and critical feedback on my work. In the years to follow, I would send countless students to Brinsley, and he would give all of them the same enthusiastic support, mentorship and guidance. He would go beyond the boundary to assist and was always willing to give helpful critiques. I would invite him to give guest lectures and he was always phenomenal, managing to push the boundaries of knowledge in a calm, serious, but witty way. We would joke about him living in the West Indiana section of the UWI library, because he would always be there. He had a space on a desk with all his research materials and notes, and he would be there almost every single day of the week the library was open. When I could not reach him on his phone I would go and find him there, along with many other visitors who would come there to find him.
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Eugene Chen: a forgotten Trinidadian

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
March 06, 2023

PART II

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeBetween 1921 and 1925, the year of Sun Yat-sen’s death, Eugene Chen was on top of his game. He was described as “Sun Yat-sen’s personal representative and spokesman in Shanghai” while the US Consul General in Shanghai described him as “one of the ablest, if not the most able, of Chinese political writers”. (Look Lai, West Meets East.)
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Suffer the little children

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 27, 2021

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeMy mother, Carmen Cudjoe (nee Batson), was born in Belmont in 1909. After spending her childhood years there, she moved to San Juan where she met my dad, married him, and moved to Tacarigua. Although my mother attended only primary school, she read constantly and wrote with eloquence and grace. In Tacarigua she was the secretary of most of the voluntary organisations there, such as the Garden Club and the Village Council.
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Human rights, equality and diversity

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 20, 2021

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeDespite its fancy-sounding title, “Human Rights, Equality and Diversity: An Inquiry into the Right to Equal Access to Education with Specific Focus on the Under-performance of Schools in Port of Spain and Environs”, the children in this area (mainly Africans) will be condemned to educational backwaters even as the Ministry of Education (MoE) continues with its anachronistic approach of not-educating our children.
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Beloved

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
November 01, 2021

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeBeloved is an excruciatingly intense novel about the slave experience written by Toni Morrison, an acclaimed African-American writer. She is the only Black woman to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She also won a Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1987. In 2012 President Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award that can be bestowed on a civilian.
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Education for those who want it

By Raffique Shah
September 13, 2021

Raffique ShahFor the second time in as many months I ask a question that is pertinent to this country’s future path, one that we need to answer because it is critical to everything else we do as we forge a road to recovery in the aftermath of the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic and the near-collapse of the national economy. It is this: are we satisfied with our education system which, give or take a tweak here, a turn there, has remained a hugely expensive relic of colonialism that refuses to die 60 years after independence.
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National heroes and history

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 24, 2021

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeA few weeks ago I listened to young Jamaican student Deane Weatherly talk about the importance of Queen Nanny of the Jamaican Maroons to her and Jamaican national life.

Queen Nanny, the leader of one of the country’s maroon groups, defeated the British in the 18th century, thereby establishing Nanny Town, a maroon town in the Blue Mountain region.
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Black & Brown People Beware

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 01, 2021

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIn 2001 when UNC was in power, I objected to its endorsement of Dr Bhoe Tewarie as principal of The University of the West Indies (UWI). I argued that Tewarie was not sufficiently prepared for such a position, his having only attained the status of “lecturer” in his academic career. Readers can determine the truth or falsity of my position.

In May 2017, when PNM recommended that Robert Bermudez serve as Chancellor of the university, I depicted his appointment in a satirical manner since I couldn’t take his appointment seriously. I believed he wasn’t the man for the job.
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A Black Race Position

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 19, 2021

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeLast Thursday, in his response to a letter written by 23 Afro-Trinbagonians about the placement of Black students in our secondary schools, Kamal Persad, coordinator of the Indian Review Committee, responded: “It is clear the under-performance of Afro-children in the education system is still at the top of the black agenda. Accordingly, these 23 persons of African descent adopted an unmistakable black race position” (Express, January 14).
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Overcoming Education Inequality

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 22, 2020

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeLast Sunday 19 distinguished citizens (call them endorsees) recommended that the SEA be replaced since it no longer serves the interest of the students it is supposed to serve (“Replacing the SEA.” They claim that our school system has not extricated itself from its “colonial inheritances in education.” The SEA examination through which we place our students into secondary schools is outmoded. It originated in the UK in 1904, the year Joseph de Suze finished writing Little Folks Trinidad, a pioneering educational work.
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