ANTI-RACISM LAB

Caribbean Education and the Cult of Quantification

Romain Khan

In what has become a national ritual in Guyana, the Ministry of Education, Guyana, and local media (public/private; print/online) have once again lauded the country’s overall performance at the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC)’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) examinations. This year’s “Release of Results Ceremony” was hosted by Guyana, where officials of the CXC confirmed that “Guyana recorded higher pass rates than the regional average at both the CSEC and CAPE levels” (Kaieteur News, 2021)—an achievement consistent with the country’s recent historical performances at these examinations. Aside from the irony of an (un)intended Guyanese exceptionalism extracted from a formality of regionalism, the ceremony valorizes statistics, and is illustrative of an amplifying regional educational obsession with numbers that congeals into an ideology that may best be described as a “cult of quantification” (Chalquist, 2009, p.169). In this Eurocentric, neoliberal schema, inflated figures testify to ontological wholeness and its obverse, impoverishment. Contrary to the perception that the region is on a novel “developmental” trajectory, this economistic model of education reinvigorates the image of the Caribbean as a classic plantation society rendered “imprisoned, deformed and schizophrenic” (Wynter, 1971, p.95) to market capitalism and its attendant hierarchies of being/humanitas and non-being/anthropos (Mignolo, 2009).

In the present moment, educational reforms at the national and regional levels privilege economic growth in the global economy. At the secondary level, the CXC indexes the quality of its educational output in its ability to “assure [...] global human resource competitiveness” (Jules, 2011). Even the University of the West Indies (UWI) that Eric Williams (1946) envisioned as an instrument of “social and political change” (p.80) has become subsumed to the corporatist model of education, with policy-makers there rationalizing the entrepreneurial trajectory of the institution “in order to generate additional income and give local industry the competitive edge in the global market” (Severin, 2001, p.86).  Knowledge is financialized and made subordinate to the supremacy of exchange value (Wynter, 1971), as surplus from affective and intellectual domains are coopted into the circuits of the capitalist knowledge economy. Judging from the negative impacts of skilled emigration (Wenner, 2016) that can hardly be offset by remittances and which is celebrated as a net gain for industrialized powers (United Nations, 2008), there is little doubt that what the cult of quantification celebrates as national achievements is a covert means of socializing West Indians for metropolitan assimilation and worse, an “ideograph [of predominantly] Blacks [as] an exploitable source of energy” (Robinson, 1983, p.82).

Neglected in this intensified corporatist vision of education is Mbembe’s (2003) warning that “The power over the life of another takes the form of commerce” (p.22), and that education for conscription as objectified labour in the global economy is a form of voluntary servitude. The gravity of these violent imperial re-inscriptions would no doubt be effaced by the compulsion to a neoliberal (Protestant) work ethic that presumably purges the colonized of their intrinsic childishness and lassitude (Shahjahan, 2011). Somehow, the policy makers overlook Fanon’s (1963) dictum that the zone of the natives is not complementary with that of the settlers, as the two are forever inimical to “a higher unity” (p.38), and despite the Caribbean’s educational expedition to exit its onto-epistemic “wilderness,” it is European capitalism and white modernity, as homicidal planetary processes, that ultimately (dis)possess the earth and non-white Others.

Further, underpinning the scientistic policy direction is a colonial center-periphery dualism that situates the Caribbean region as economically and intellectually removed from western modernity, thus a “place of non-thought” (Mignolo, 2009, p.3) rendered riotous by folklore, myth and non-western religions—knowledges of the provision grounds/plot that are symbolic of spaces of creative resistance (Wynter, 1971). Presumably lacking the capacity for knowledge-production, regional education and Caribbean subjects collectively constitute an uncultivated onto-epistemic frontier, awaiting domestication by the precision of western technical and scientific disciplines (Shahjahan, 2011). Didacus Jules (2011), former Registrar of the CXC, describes education as “a rising tide of civilization lifting all boats” which perhaps communicates the implicit thesis that the Caribbean subject awaits “discovery” by white cognition (Mills, 1997) in the form of commodified education, so as to finally unmoor from a “depraved” zone of non-being into one of Euro-centered “civilized being.” In other words, the Caribbean as the “enunciated” seemingly only acquires historical meaning when the “enunciator” (Mignolo, 2009), Europe, speaks it into existence, and therefore ontologically, Caribbean education policy is securing more a white futurity instead of a creolized, syncretic one grounded equally in the wisdom of the region’s folk assemblages. Tragically, too the cult of quantification ignores that the civilizational project of Euro-American modernity is an “ecologicidal civilization” or one of death (Grosfoguel, 2019) that secures the life of the white humanitas through the dispossession of the non-white anthropos, and therefore as Robinson (1983) notes, imperatives to assimilation attract a countervailing impulse to subjugation.

Positivism and the fetish of numbers is theocratic and authoritarian, the newest “God’s eye view of knowledge” (Grosfoguel, 2012, p.88), that proclaims itself divine and within the neoliberal landscape, masquerades as the incontestable social horizon beyond which there are no alternatives (De Lissovoy, 2019). No wonder, therefore, that the region’s influential educational institutions and policy-makers seem enamored of this racialized ideology and pursue national and individual “cult membership.” Wynter (1968) entreats an introspection to unveil the region’s trauma before launching a “constant revolutionary assault” (as cited in Dear, 2018, p.30) against this economic model: that is, without critical reflection and confrontation with the sickness of our collective capitalist hallucination, we are imperiled. As we mistakenly stare into the quantitative horizon of the plantation for neoliberal redemption, we ignore the restorative ambiguity of the African and syncretic cultural formations that lay dormant in the epistemic plot, and which contain the richest possibilities for decolonizing our thinking and ways of being. Regardless, it appears we are exultant in our sickness, and tragically as W.H. Auden observes:

“We would rather be ruined than changed

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.”

Works Cited

  1. Auden, W. H. (2011). The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue. Princeton University Press.
  2. Chalquist, C. (2009). Insanity by the Numbers, Knowings from the Ground: Outgrowing and Outloving the Cult of Quantification. In S. Porterfield, K. Polette, & T. F. Baumlin (Eds.), Perpetual Adolescence- Jungian Analyses of American Media, Literature and Pop Culture (pp. 169-187). SUNY Press.
  3. Dear, L. (2019). The University as Branch Plant Industry. In J. Cupples & R. Grosfoguel (Eds.), Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University (pp. 23-42). Routledge.
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  5. Jules, D. (2011, May 25). Achieving Universal Quality Education: Supporting Learning to Achieve Better Results – A CXC Perspective [PDF]. Caribbean Examinations Council. https://www.cxc.org/SiteAssets/Achieving%20Universal%20Quality%20Education%20-%20CXC%2024%20May%202011.pdf
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About the Author

Romain Khan is a Doctoral student who identifies proudly with his Caribbean roots. His research critically engages the confluence of decoloniality, racial subjection and the geopolitics of knowledge in relation to the ongoing modernist project in the Caribbean's newest petrostate, Guyana.