NAME OF FEATURE | THE GLEANER | SUNDAY, JUNE 9, 2024 8 By Patrick Smith APART FROM the Church, the schoolhouse was the only social institution for the masses of Jamaicans in the many decades following Emancipation. Catholicism was displaced by Anglicanism with the advent of the English and became the colonial religion after 1655. Other non-conformist sects made their appearance up to the latter 18th century and with the indomitable African presence, created a menagerie of faiths, beliefs, and systems of worship. The Church and the School were the two pillars of social engineering in the run-up to Emancipation and several decades thereafter. The Emancipation Act had, at its core, THREE issues: freeing the enslaved people, compensation to their former owners and “…improving the industry of the manumitted slaves.” In compliance with the last, the colonial authority in 1835 passed the Negro Education Act aimed at the establishment of elementary education for the children of the emancipated people. The rudimentary education system contemplated was designed to create a class of manual workers to perpetuate the plantation system, post-Emancipation, and to preserve the socio-economic-political order. Schools had been established in Jamaica by the Church, through grants and bequests from as early as the 1720s. These were largely for the education of the children of the planter and mercantile classes. A grant, resulting from the so-called Negro Education Act, was aimed at establishing elementary schooling on a wider basis, and was augmented by funds made available by the denominations and bequests. By the 1860s there were 394 schools in Jamaica managed by seven denominations, with the Anglicans having the largest share. That number grew to 962 by 1894. By 1910 there were only 68 Government schools, representing under 10 percent of elementary schools, the total number having been reduced to 693 island-wide. CLERGYMEN AS EDUCATORS Education was delivered mainly by clergymen and their assistants before the 1838 establishment of the Mico College, the early training institution established by the Moravians at Fairfield and the Ebeneezer, run by the Presbyterians in the 1870s to train young men for the mission. It was out of these early beginnings that later emerged Education Associations in Kingston, Porus and Troja, the first of which was established in 1884. By the time a modified form of self-government was introduced, after the abolition of the old plantocratic representational system, there was a small but significant number of educated black people to offer themselves for representational politics. It was these teachers of the early training colleges who blazed a scorching trail in political life in the latter part of the 19th century, after the restoration of a limited form of representative government in 1892. The popular rebellion in Morant Bay in October 1865 had been met with swift reprisals and the abolition of the Old Representative System, dominated by the planter and mercantile classes. In 1894 the five educational associations coalesced with the Jamaica Union of Teachers (JUT), after an inaugural conference in Spanish Town. From that point, the teachers became an important part of the political development of the Jamaican society. The JUT became a bastion in the struggle for rights and opportunities for the fledgling political system. It must, however, be stated from the outset that the Jamaica Union of Teachers was never countenanced as a trade union in the way we see it today. It was tolerated as a benevolent organisation with school managers and the clergy numbering among its rank and file. Indeed, many of the early leaders were headmasters and lay preachers. The union became quite influential, and its members served in numerous colonial agencies and organisations. By 1892 free elementary education was introduced with the passing of the Elementary and Secondary Education Laws. The law established, among other things, the Board of Education as the body responsible for the educational vote and for resolving disputes between teachers and managers and teachers and inspectors. The JUT was also represented on the Board, a practice which persists to the present. TEACHER IN THE LEGISLATURE After 1894 also, there was always a teacher sitting as a member in the pre-and post-independence legislature. In that regard, the teachers’ influence spanned the schoolhouse to Kings House FROM THE SCHOOLHOUSE TO KING’S HOUSE The teacher’s role in national development in pre- and post-independent Jamaica Patrick R. Smith Noel Monteith Howard Cooke Edwin Allen Burchell Whiteman PLEASE SEE HOUSE, 46 JTA 60TH ANNIVERSARY FEATURE
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