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As we Barbadians are stunned time and time again by barbaric and callous acts of criminal violence, it has become commonplace to bemoan the lack of positive values in many of our people.
And so, we often hear demands for a return to long-lost values, or perhaps, more accurately, a turn to values.
But how does a society inculcate values in its people, particularly its youth?
Does it do so by having politicians and preachers shout dogmatic assertions at them about the need for them to have better values and to behave better?
Or will well-written, self-righteous newspaper editorials do the trick?
Will the public publication and deployment of self-improvement slogans be successful? ‘Just say ‘No’ to guns?’
Surely, we all must know that none of these approaches will have the desired effect.
So, how can we effectively give our people – particularly our youth – a proper conception of life in all of its complexity and a set of values that will “root” their personalities and imbue them with a strong and healthy sense of identity, morality and ethics, and a coherent perspective on the world?
Well, might I suggest that the single most effective way of doing so is to deploy and utilise our arts and our artists?
Might I suggest that the most potent response we can make to the social and cultural crisis that we are currently grappling with is to deploy and utilise our writers, historians, religious scholars, musicians, choreographers and dancers, poets, dramatists, painters and sculptors, film-makers, and photographers, and their novels, history books, theological texts, songs, dances, poems, plays, paintings, sculptures, films and photographs?
You see, values are of supreme importance, but values do not help us to navigate our way through life unless they become our own – a part of our mental make-up.
This therefore means that they must be more than mere formulae or dogmatic assertions: rather, we must think and feel with them!
And therefore, for our society to be able to inculcate positive values in its people such that they “think and feel” with said values, it must expose them, in a systematic way, to conscious music, classic novels, great works of history, works of cultural and religious analysis, inspirational poetry, entertaining and penetrating paintings, films, plays, choreographies and works of dance theatre.
The whole idea is to get our people – particularly our youth – to internalise critical values by intimately experiencing them in the relevant texts and artistic products.
Our cultural authorities therefore need to totally disabuse themselves of the false notion that the content of the output of our singers and musicians is of no social consequence and has no effect on the minds and behaviour of our people.
Those of us who came to maturity in the 1970s and who were fed on a diet of musical fare centred on the likes of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Draytons Two, Third World, Earth Wind and Fire, Stevie Wonder, and Black Stalin know only too well the impact that such songs had on our sense of self and community.
And so, both in our informal education system – our popular media – and in our school system we must deploy and utilise the arts as the pre-eminent mechanism for instilling positive values.
Our national cultural authorities must now seriously go to work to motivate, incentivise and facilitate the production of conscious and meaningful songs and other works of art, and have them dominate our public sphere.
And our national educational authorities must rapidly reverse course on the terrible, destructive trend of de-emphasising and even phasing out such critical subjects as History, English Literature and religious studies.
Indeed, far from phasing out these subjects, we should be prioritising them and using them to reach our youth in the deepest recesses of their being.
Let our educational system find a place of honour for George Lamming’s novels, Hilary Beckles’ works of history, Derek Walcott’s and Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry, CLR James’ works of cultural and philosophical analysis, Kwame Nkrumah’s political philosophy, Mighty Gabby’s folk and calypso classics, and Bob Marley’s world music – works of art that teem with the most vital ideas about the inner development of man and of human society.
David A Comissiong is Barbados Ambassador to CARICOM.
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