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The Argonauts of postcolonial modernity: elite Barbadian schools in globalising circumstances

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Abstract

In her book, Neoliberalism as Exception, Aihwa Ong usefully observes that the North American university has been dirempted from it historical role of preparing young people for democratic citizenship. It has instead, according to Ong, become the great global marketplace and grand bazaar for international students' ambitions. In what follows, we draw on Ong's insights. Specifically, we report on a global ethnographic study that looks at the way in which six form students (whom we are calling the ‘Argonauts’) in two Barbadian elite schools – Old Cloisters and Ardent Arbors – are orienting themselves to the future in a moment of aggressive recruiting by North American universities. These developments bring students' global imaginations into profound tension with historical narratives and traditions linking these schools to England. This new context is epitomised by the transactions between the students and international college representatives at an annual international college fair that brings North American recruiters to the island in search of academic talent. We document this encounter at some length, pointing to the collision between the students' roiling ambitions and the schools' deep sense of heritage and tradition linked to the metropolitan paradigm of British public school traditions.
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The Argonauts of postcolonial modernity: elite
Barbadian schools in globalising circumstances
Cameron McCarthy, Ergin Bulut, Michelle Castro, Koeli Goel & Heather
Greenhalgh-Spencer
To cite this article: Cameron McCarthy, Ergin Bulut, Michelle Castro, Koeli Goel & Heather
Greenhalgh-Spencer (2014) The Argonauts of postcolonial modernity: elite Barbadian schools
in globalising circumstances, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 12:2, 211-227, DOI:
10.1080/14767724.2014.899137
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2014.899137
Published online: 03 Apr 2014.
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The Argonauts of postcolonial modernity: elite Barbadian schools in
globalising circumstances
Cameron McCarthy*, Ergin Bulut, Michelle Castro, Koeli Goel and
Heather Greenhalgh-Spencer
Department of Educational Policy and the Institute of Communications Research,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA
(Received 26 November 2013; accepted 26 February 2014)
In her book, Neoliberalism as Exception, Aihwa Ong usefully observes
that the North American university has been dirempted from it historical
role of preparing young people for democratic citizenship. It has instead,
according to Ong, become the great global marketplace and grand bazaar
for international studentsambitions. In what follows, we draw on Ongs
insights. Specifically, we report on a global ethnographic study that looks
at the way in which six form students (whom we are calling the
Argonauts) in two Barbadian elite schools Old Cloisters and Ardent
Arbors are orienting themselves to the future in a moment of aggressive
recruiting by North American universities. These developments bring
studentsglobal imaginations into profound tension with historical narra-
tives and traditions linking these schools to England. This new context is
epitomised by the transactions between the students and international
college representatives at an annual international college fair that brings
North American recruiters to the island in search of academic talent. We
document this encounter at some length, pointing to the collision between
the studentsroiling ambitions and the schoolsdeep sense of heritage and
tradition linked to the metropolitan paradigm of British public school
traditions.
Keywords: Argonauts; Barbadian elite schools; international college fair;
post-developmentalism; global ethnography
I love Barbados very much but I guess we always like or want what we dont
have (Leigha, Old Cloisters Sixth Form Student)
The Barbados College Fair emerged at the same time as the US government was
pulling back from the region the US universities moved in forcefully
Barbadians regard US education very highly the US universities have played
a role in development around the world. (Clara Eastern, US Embassy, Barbados
at the International College Fair, Barbados, 11/6/13)
Our school is perhaps the archetype of failing to keep up with times. (Blaise
Pascal, Old Cloisters Sixth Form Student)
*Corresponding author. Email: cameron.cmccart1@gmail.com
Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2014
Vol. 12, No. 2, 211227, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2014.899137
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
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Introduction
This essay is situated at the complex juncture of the global imaginations of
Barbadian elite secondary school youngsters and the processes of globalisation
that bring recruiting representatives from North American tertiary education
institutions to the island every year in pursuit of potential university academic
talent. This educational encounter, and the historical ironies that it generates, is
set against the backdrop of processes of uneven development particular to a
small emergent society with a long colonial past linked to England now
transitioning into the post-independence era. The Barbadian schools that are
the focus of this analysis are Old Cloisters and Ardent Arbors. These school
sites are part of a larger international study looking at the contemporary
circumstances of the British-bequeathed public school model in nine different
countries (Singapore, India, Hong Kong, South Africa, Australia, England,
Argentina, Northern Cyprus and Barbados). This study concentrates attention
on students in the last two years of schooling attending what is called sixth
form
1
and stays with them into their first year after school. In what follows, we
draw on archival and contemporary documents (school magazines going
back to 1901, newspaper articles, online newspapers and websites) as well
as observational research field notes and interviews with students, teachers,
principals, alumni, parents, school councillors and international college fair
recruiters to situate the current historical conjuncture of elite schooling in
Barbados within a larger theoretical and policy framework that addresses
the role of these schools in producing a historically specific type of elite
class whom we are calling, after Anna Saxenian (2006), the Argonauts
of postcolonial modernity. This is a particular kind of elite class with
historical roots of transnationality tied to colonialism and migration and
contemporary youth aspirations that are situated within the possibilities and
limitations of a postcolonial Barbados. While not necessarily situated within
the high-end of the finance class identified in Eurocentric theories of
globalisation, these postcolonial Argonauts are negotiating the educational
legacy of colonialism in post-independence times that come with their own
challenges. For like Jasons fellow travellers who pursued the mythical
Golden Fleece in Greek ancient lore, these Barbadian Argonauts are
breaking with an older tradition that once tied Barbadian post-school
futures to universities in England, seeking instead tertiary education and
future careers in Canada and the USA. As such, they participate in a broader
migration of labour from Barbados and the Caribbean region to the USA
and Canada.
2
Old Cloisters and Ardent Arbors are unique schools in the larger
international study in the following sense: there are basically state schools
that are run like statutory corporations with principals having a high
degree of autonomy as one would see in the case of the British
Broadcasting Corporation. Both schools have a not-too-distant history of
212 C. McCarthy et al.
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being the exclusive enclaves of white planter-mercantile elites. Indeed, all
of Old Cloisters headmasters going back to 1733 and right up until almost
the last quarter of the twentieth century came from Oxford, Cambridge or
Trinity College. This has had a particular effect. All of Barbadosprime
ministers and governor generals, except two, have come from one school
Old Cloisters. But it was the government led by one of Harold Laskis
students, Prime Minister Errol Barrow, that in a flurry of post-independence
social Fabianism in the 1960s abolished all tuition to these elite schools
and made admission conditional solely on academic performance in the
British-derived Common Entrance Exam. This opened the floodgates to the
black gentrified working class (Beckles 2006;Hoyos1989; Jemmott 2006)
who would, in turn, assimilate into the new black middle classes of the
country. These schools have, since slightly before Barbadosindependence
in the 1960s, become zones of exception for the high-achieving sons and
daughters of the gentrified working class of carpenters, masons, and police
officers and a stretchy middle class of professionals such as doctors,
lawyers and accountants. The schoolseliteness, therefore, is not con-
structed around obvious evidence of material wealth but is presently built
largely around high academic achievement and their rich histories of school
traditions going back to the eighteenth-century British public school ritual,
heraldry and liberal arts curricular composition. There is, then, a powerful
discourse of meritocratic justification that effaces race and class in the
language of both school authorities and students. Barbadoselite schools,
as the historical artefacts of a colonial past, serve as sites of renegotiation
of race, class and social status in the postcolonial context. Old Cloisters
and Ardent Arbors operate as powerful vectors of meritocratic principles.
As Old CloistersDeputy Principal Stuart Calmley pointedly told us: we
have students from every stratum of Barbados. These schools are therefore
sites of disavowalof stratification of any kind, to use the language of
Homi Bhabha (Bhabha 1994,122).
These features of the Barbadian elite schools compel us to think about the
formation of elites in historically specific and variable ways, as well as to
consider the uneven processes of globalisation as they are revealed in
historical and contemporary pressures and opportunities that confront small
societies like Barbados with a colonial past linked to England. In this context,
the study of schooling is pivotal to the understanding of class formation in the
era of globalisation and postcolonialism.
3
And, Old Cloisters and Ardent
Arbors now sit as Janus-like institutions awkwardly adapting to an era of
neoliberal change with their strategic plans and powerful student ambitions
that both draw on and fracture school identities linked to illustrious pasts. The
schools, student bodies and parents are negotiating the social contract that
offered the gentrified black working classes the prospect of upwards mobility.
This conjuncture is marked both by ruptures and continuities and a profound
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sense of hybridity that works through the historical context, the physiognomy
and spatiality of the schools, the school curriculum and the roiling ambitions
of school youth.
Very valuable to our understanding of the elite school context in this paper
is the scholarship around globalisation that addresses the issue of the
permutations of globalising processes in states attempting to transition out of
pasts defined by profound histories of colonial domination. The breaking up of
emerging states into zones of exceptions the disarticulation of territory,
authority and rights manifested in the gradations of citizenry and citizenship,
and the transnational impulses that generate currents of expulsion and absorp-
tion of population cannot be separated from the lived and commodified
processes of education. Here, the scholarship of Ong (1999,2006), Sassen
(2008), and Massey (2005,2007) converge with the thinking of postcolonial
theorists, such as Bhabha (1990), in calling attention to the uneven develop-
ment and radical hybridity operating in the context of post-developmental
states (Ong 2006, 76). Ong, in particular, focuses sharp attention on the
historical specificity and nuance that inform cultural mediation of these global
forces(Burawoy et al. 2000, 41). Ong calls attention to the neoliberal
aspirations of the East Asian young that are revealed in rational calculations
regarding their ambitions for tertiary education and professional futures that
make North American institutions pivotal in the project of mobilisation of
value and personal branding as young people move towards tertiary education
and careerism as the members of a new transnational creative class. Post-
colonial theorists such as Prashad (2012)andMadrid(2012), on the other
hand, call for a methodological social thickness(Sassen 2000, 216) that
might help us grapple with the plural manifestations of the global in current
times of world economic crisis and capital restructuring. It is these watch
words of social thicknessthat inform our discussion of the current
moment in Barbadian elite schooling one rife with markers of change
roughly grafted on to traditional practices and forms. We discuss the
schools and the transnational historical context in which they emerged and
regard students as the authors of their future that extends from a colonial
past. This is a colonial past from which the nation desires to delink itself
through schooling and education that is very much shaped by a hybrid
combination of British traditions and the emergent assertions of Bajanness.
We conclude by looking at the implications of these globalising circum-
stances now being thrust upon Barbadian schools as these young people
seek to hitch a ride with their school certificates to North America. First,
we very briefly summarise the broader context of globalisation into which
the island and these schools can be situated. These currents of change work
back into the schools and accent the new terms in which the Argonauts are
approaching schooling and their futures.
214 C. McCarthy et al.
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The present and the past: sketching the scene
An insistently powerful policy discourse of change hangs over the small island
country of Barbados as it, like many moderate to high HDI developing
countries around the world (Trinidad, Singapore, etc.), shifts into the deep
waters and stormy currents of globalisation (Stiglitz 2003,2012). Barbados
turn in this direction may have been undertaken significantly after that of
Singapore, for example, and its economic progress less marked. Yet there are
dramatic changes taking place in the very economic, social and cultural
structure of this former British colony, known as little England. Delinking
from colonialism based on agriculture, Barbados has begun to shift its
economic gears towards a service economy model. But this new economic
path has meant that the island has become more dependent on imported
capital goods and consumer goods, partly as a result of the influence of North
American consumption patterns(University of the West Indies economics
professor, Andrew Downes, first round interview). This new service economy
spans health care tourism, financial and business services, with new dynamic
sectors in construction and real estate, and in consumer-driven services in
food, electrical appliances, furniture and entertainment within the local market
that are being rescaled to regional and global targets. This represents a
profound change in what was an agrarian economy with a tourism sector and a
very small import substitution initiative in manufacturing up until two
decades ago.
4
In the realm of culture, the island is also fast becoming a site of the play of
global cultural articulations fuelled by the constant circulation of images
generated in the newspapers, television, film and radio. This is amplified by
the ubiquitous presence of cell phones, iPods, laptops and the growing online
consciousness among the young. Barbados is at the same time home to
moving populations of a wide range of PMC and skilled and semi-skilled
labour from within the Caribbean region, China and India. It hosts, as well,
diplomatic officials from the region, entrepreneurial groups and smatterings of
the idle rich who have sought to establish their own gated communities such
as the Fort Charles Marina on the northwest coast of the island. Within this
tumult, or perhaps because of it, the Barbados government is engaged in a
national project of constructing Bajanness. We understand Bajanness as a
nationalist assertion of unity in difference, which functions as a masquerade of
hybridity and a circulation of new influences and cultural sources a more or
less benign nationalist project of Africanist priority that is susceptible to the
constant exile and return of Barbadian immigrants to the USA, Canada and
England. The major symbol of this changing cultural environment is that of
the international sensation, Rihanna, the daughter of a Barbadian father and a
Guyanese mother. As pointed out to us by one of the curriculum leaders at Old
Cloisters School, Claire Livingston, Rihanna is part of a new multicultural-
ismthat is spicing up Barbados. An even more interesting symbol of this
Globalisation, Societies and Education 215
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hybridity and change is the much beloved late Prime Minister, David
Thompson (he died in office a few years ago). Thompson was born and grew
up, until age eight, in England. He was the son of a British secretary and a
Barbadian porter. It is within this extraordinary context of hybridity and
movement that developments in the Barbados elite schools must be situated.
Schools ancient and modern: Old Cloisters and Ardent Arbors
Both Old Cloisters and Ardent Arbors are schools that were established to
promote the education of white youth (boys in the case of Old Cloisters; girls
in the case of Ardent Arbors) who could not afford the exclusive education
overseas in England (Eton, Harrow, Rugby) or in the USA (William and
Mary). But these same schools would quickly become the preserve of fee-
paying planter/mercantile elites who saw the schools rise in status as
educational institutions of excellence. For instance, as early as 1901, the
school magazine of Old Cloisters would claim that school to be the best
school in the West Indies, (Editors 1901, 1). The photographs on the walls of
the school halls provide evidence of the claim to a heritage fashioned in
colonial times. Every single school principal at Old Cloisters and Ardent
Arbors, right up to the early part of the post-independence era, came from
Englands elite universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College, the Univer-
sity of London and so forth. But on our research visits, visible and embodied
evidence of postcolonial change was registered everywhere: the schools
principals, the teachers, the students, their key stakeholders were now of
Afro-Barbadian or Caribbean background. This transition we were told in
our interviews with students, principals, teachers and critical analysts outside
the school did not happen by some process of natural attrition of Barbadian
local whites but reflected a mix of Fabian socialist educational and social
policy interventions introduced by the Barbados Democratic Labor Party
government (led by Errol Barrow) just around independence and consolidated
thereafter. These policies aimed at expanding access to the grammar schools to
all Barbadians(Stuart Calmley, Acting Principal at Old Cloisters) based on
competitive exam results (scores in the British-bequeathed Common Entrance
Exams) as part of a policy agenda of universal secondary education. With this
development, and within the space of a decade, these schools shifted from a
white, elite predominance to the majority presence of the children of the black
working and professional classes. Old Cloisters and Ardent Arbors are
emblematic markers of this policy of meritocratic reorientation of the schools.
They serve, in our view, as the postcolonial sites of the pasting over of social
contradictions and the making of the new middle classes of the country.
However, Barbados is now entering a new post-developmentalphase
within which the government has set 2020 as the year when it will have
officially entered the group of nations labelled as developed. This small island
is now strategically engaged with globalisation and neoliberalism where Old
216 C. McCarthy et al.
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Cloisters and Ardent Arbors now publish strategic plans within which we get to
understand how these two uneven, contradictory, conflicted and hybrid institu-
tions are animated by the nodal discourse of globalism(Fairclough 2006,78)
and position themselves accordingly. These developments are also registered
literally on the ground in the spatiality and character of school architecture and
the challenge of control over school narratives and branding that define these
schools as the islands two top academic centres of secondary education.
Negotiating tradition and eliteness: the peculiarities of Old Cloisters and
Ardent Arbors
Old Cloisters and Ardent Arbors are located in different parts of the island; the
former in a bustling section of the capital, the latter in a new suburb called New
Jerusalem. The location and the architecture of these two schools suggest a lot
about the extent to which they are rescaling and reorienting to the new demands
of the twenty-first century at different speeds. Old Cloisters is tucked into a
corner of one of the busiest city streets in the capital of Barbados. To approach
the school is difficult in the sense that you must contend with busy traffic and
virtually non-existent sidewalks. Car after car passed us through the schools
entrance. Parents with sometimes big SUVs big for the narrow roads that
spread across the island like viscous rhizomes were dropping off their
children. To enter Old Cloister through its main gate way, off Mahogany lane,
is to enter a zone of disciplined bucolic space a sculptured, manicured and
landscaped terrain in which markers of a carefully preserved past, linked to the
colonial era, frame the visitors arrival. The British grammar school tradition is
evident as a powerful imperial symbolic that materially dwells within the zone
of reference that Basil Bernstein calls a restricted code(1977, 4) of school
uniform, emblems, flags, school songs and the ritual of time Michaelmas
Term, Hilary Term and Trinity Term old ways of ordering the school world.
There is evidence of these colonial condensations everywhere. The preserved
colonial past on the school campus marks a distinct contrast between the school
and the busy city in that movement into the school already marks one as a
distinct subject. One gets the sense that Old Cloisters is in the city but not of the
city. As s/he enters through the ornate school gate from the busy Mohogany
Street, the visitor is drawn to a peach marble frieze, Old Cloisterians
Commemorative Wall, that memorialises distinguished old Cloisterians going
back to 1733. The rich coding of this landscape emphasises the pastoral nature
of the schoolsmission, its commitment to its past and its distinctiveness as a
place of learning. The markers of this extraordinary past are encoded in the
cricket pitch surrounded by the old Georgian buildings of the school as if Old
Cloisters sought to emulate Cambridge or Oxford where the cricket field also
has an elevated prominence. From this chorus of ancient buildings and playing
field, the visitor looks outwards beyond the school walls to the modern central
bank building, an example of late twentieth century international style a glass
Globalisation, Societies and Education 217
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and concrete rectangular structure, like a mobile, hanging on six tubular vertical
trusses or concrete cylindrical rods. Another visible structure is the islands
Anglican Cathedral, St Michaels, equally as ancient as Old Cloisters. In a
striking way, these two very different types of architectural structures (the
cathedral and the central bank) metaphorically frame the central dilemma into
which this school is thrown. How can the school simultaneously consolidate its
tradition (to which it is so evidently committed) and maintain its pride of
independence, while responding to the forces of globalisation?
These questions apply to the other elite school under study. Ardent Arbors is
also a zone of exception but more keenly takes on the neoliberal demeanour.
Ardent Arbors sits on a section of a highly developed area of a growing
professional middle-class development in the parish of St James in Barbados.
This development is called New Jerusalem. In contrast to Old Cloisters, Ardent
Arborsbuilding stock is contemporary but somewhat faceless as though it
came off an assembly line or was hatched from a World Bank master design for
schools in subtropical Third World countries. Its many louvred windows
seemed architecturally designed to cool downthe school, creating a natural air
conditioning to combat the warm, humid climate which residents in the island
endure for a large part of the year. The effect is that of a building that feels
open, ventilated and contemporary, while preserving a panoptic centrality for
the principals office. The building registers both a feeling of optimism that is
echoed again and again in our interviews with students but also a sense of
facelessness that alumni who schooled at Ardent Arbors in its previous location
in the city, particularly express. Indeed, a mural of the old school building with
its colonial vernacular architecture is painted on the exterior wall of one of the
wings of classrooms that face the schools small quad. Memories and nostalgia
for the past hang around in the present of both Ardent Arbors and Cloisters.
There is a strong sense, too, in Ardent Arborscurrent architectural choice,
of a school that is attempting to navigate beyond its past in order to grapple
with the new imperatives of the future. As one enters the Ardent Arbors
vestibule, the juxtaposition of the past and present is announced in a sharp
way. Two striking sets of signs drape the walls on either side of the entrance to
the principals office. On one side, a marble plaque commemorates the visit of
Queen Elizabeth II launching the new building in 1989: This Foundation
Stone Was Laid By Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, Friday March 10, 1989.
But the plaque also announces a new beginning. Over the foundation stone
hangs a cloth banner elaborating the future imperative of nurturing a creative
class: Ardent Arbors of the future will continue to strive for academic excel-
lence but will be mindful of the need to produce articulate, confident, tolerant,
creative, well-rounded, highly motivated individuals with a passion for life-
long learning. On the other side of the principals office another banner lies
unfurled. Under the heading Core Values, it lists the following themes:
academic success,self-confidence,critical thinking,mastery learning,
218 C. McCarthy et al.
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humility,care and nurture,creativity,life-long learningand productive
citizenship. Beneath these core values, also on marble, is the schools mission
statement: to provide excellent secondary and tertiary education academic,
physical which enables students to function effectively in a changing
environment(field notes, 3/11/2011).
Both Ardent Arbors and Old Cloisters struggle with the past as they are
pulled towards a new horizon of expectations and pressures. The most dramatic
feature of both schools then is the demise of the white elite population and the
overwhelming presence of a stretchy middle class of largely Afro-Barbadian
youth.
5
As far as class is concerned, these sites once again reminded us of the
significance of the postcolonial context as far as transnational elite class
formation is concerned. What we found in the Barbados secondary grammar
schools was not the transnational elite, defined by Robinson (2004,2012),
Sklair (2009) and others as the children of members of multinational corpora-
tions, but often, paradoxically, the children of carpenters, electricians, masons
and secretaries along with the children of lawyers and doctors, the occasional
local businessman; in other words a very stretchy middle. Prominently absent
were the children of the white planter mercantile economic elites who had
dominated the schools during the era of their most exclusivist regimes in the
nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Further, the global connections,
identified by the students and staff of these schools, are not necessarily
constructed around finance but rather tied to the diasporic links to family and
acquaintances residing abroad. Even the poorest working-class child, according
to School Councilor Janice Jemmott at Ardent Arbors, has family connections
in North America, the UK or Latin America. It is these familial links that would
provide the bulk of the references to global connections in our interviews with
students. And it is these familial global connections that students indicated they
will draw on for support in their efforts to seek futures overseas. It is also these
diasporic connections that serve sometimes as conduits for the siphoning off of
laptops and other technologies from New York or Miami or Toronto to
Barbados (the Barbados Government abets this transfer through its zero-tax
policy on imported information machines such as computers). This push and
pull of outside forces as reflected, for instance, in the allure of New York,
Toronto and faraway places to youngsters who feel that their futures cannot be
fulfilled in the island also helps to constitute these students as prime targets for
recruitment to tertiary education abroad.
The college fair: the rendezvous of the students with education abroad
EB: I have two questions with respect to your future plans. Where is the desire
for clinical psychology and Princeton coming from?
Ashley: Oh, where is that desire coming from? [nervous laugh] Well I
have wanted to be a psychologist since primary school I find the brain very
interesting in terms of like human behavior in that I find mental disorders and
addictions really interesting.so I would do that clinical psychology
Globalisation, Societies and Education 219
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Princeton now, I was actually thinking about that, if I am going to the College
Fair, because I was thinking well, why do I want these brand named schools?
And, I feel like that might be just how I was raised.)
The point at which we entered the research field in the Barbados elite school
context revealed ruptures and tensions with the consolidated narrative of these
schools that reached back to England in the eighteenth century. We now were
entering a research context in Barbados at a flashpoint of profound change
and disruption of the British grammar school model. The forces of globalisa-
tion, the downturn in the global economy and the emergence of the post-
development state, the expansion of the media environment dominated by
American cultural form, and the ubiquitous access to cell phones and the
Internet that define the everyday life of the young, have generated new
rambunctious entrepreneurial desires and imaginations for exotic career futures
within the contemporary youth communities that exceed the capacities of the
school and the nation. This has resulted in strategic action on the part of
students reflected in new curricular choices (the shift towards business, law,
economics, accounts, communications studies, digital media and entrepren-
eurship) parked alongside the old liberal arts emphasis in the humanities that
constitutes the historical bequeath to these schools.
This development is occurring in concert with new aggressive recruitment
of students by universities in the USA and Canada (Best 2011). This reciprocal
investment precipitated by a metropolitan generated opportunism underwrit-
ten by the new priorities of NAFTA and WTO to externally integrate Third
World economies (inclusive of services such as health and education) into the
global system has brought the phenomenon of the annual International
College Fair showcasing USA, Canadian and UK universities and colleges
onto the Barbadian setting. The International College Fair we observed was
attended by a wide cross-section of secondary school students. Old Cloisters
and Ardent Arbors had the largest representations of their students at this
event. There were a total of 51 booths in all. The Canadian universities
represented the strongest contingent at the College Fair; the University of
Toronto, McGill, Ryerson, Waterloo and York had booths there. The US
embassy was there along with representatives from private colleges such as
DeVry College, Florida Institute of Technology, Stetson and others. English
universities and educators were also represented. City and Guilds, most
prominently, reached beyond academics to the vocational, boasting: 500
different qualifications in 28 industries. The interest between the institutions
and the students is mutual. For instance, Director of Undergraduate Recruit-
ment, Andre Jardin, is quoted in the Barbados Nation newspaper of 8
November 2011 as saying that the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exam-
ination (CAPE) was one of the strongest systems you could do anywhere
its actually stronger than our own Canadian curriculum(Best 2011, 8).
220 C. McCarthy et al.
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As we strolled around the International College Fair venue at the
Sherbourne Convention Centre with the students, we could see that the fair
provided a venue for students to articulate their most strongly held ambitions.
The students indicated interest in jobs such as computer engineering,
mechanical engineering music, solar engineering, ecology, business manage-
ment, underwater welding, voice training, theatre and comedy occupational
interests that their school curriculum did not prepare them for. We felt that the
realisation of these dreams, sometimes of exotic occupations, ran up against
the constraints defined by stratified access to material resources. Given their
lower middle-class backgrounds, many of these students did not have the
financial resources to fund the tertiary education and job preparation that their
ambitions dictated. Most of these students then, in reality, placed their hopes in
obtaining one of the small number of Barbados government scholarships
offered every year to students who had near-perfect scores (all As) in the
CAPE exams. Many of them, too, hoped to secure government low-interest
loans to fund their schooling in North America a very onerous financial
transaction should they and their families secure such a loan. Many of these
students would most likely end up going to the University of the West Indies
in Barbados. But at the International College Fair these constraints did not
curb the studentsexpression of their desire to seek futures abroad.
While the students were trying to realise their dreams, the recruiters were
after their own, rational calculative goals. A primary interest was in the
potential revenue that might come from self-fundedstudents from countries
like Barbados. International recruiter John Fletcher and his colleague Natasha
from Bryant University in Eastern Canada spelt it out to for us. Students from
Barbados added to a broad revenue picture derivable from recruitment from
the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America and Africa. North American institutions
had the supplyto meet pent up demand. Fletcher noted this revenue
interest:
Fletcher: Gosh.I know I havent talked to our finance person for a couple of
years about it but the last time she mention it she said, No one makes the return
on investment that you doi.e. in my business area [international recruiting].
Fletcher, Natasha and other international recruiters like Amanda made it clear
that the recruiters were also interested in a more long-term game plan that
linked economics to the changing demographics of North America. This long-
term project, Fletcher and Natasha indicated, resided in the prospect of adding
exceptionally competent young people from around the world at the point of
their graduation from the tertiary institutions in Canada to the high rungs of
creative labour in that country. As recruiters noted, Canadas population was
ageing (Fletcher) and international students could potentially fulfil needs in
key sectors of the Canadian knowledge-based economy.
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Finally, recruiters saw these students as constituting a kind of multicultural
spice necessary for the flavouring the cultural competence of their domestic,
white population. In this respect, students from countries like Barbados,
Taiwan, India and Kenya provided a civilising mission in reverse for North
American students helping to prepare them for encounters with this radically
globalising world context in the present and later in life.
Ultimately, the view of the world through the eyes of the international
recruiter is one that is grounded in the international interests and capacities of
North American institutions. Their interests and their recruiting efforts
intersected with a particular moment of a restlessness and drive for mobility
within the student bodies of Old Cloisters and Ardent Arbors. These students
lives existentially embodied movement and a latent and active cosmopolitan-
ism registered both in their technological savvy as well as the keen markers of
hybridity and trans-border family affiliation that kept coming up in our
interviews with them.
From scholars to entrepreneurs, or as the neoliberal waves hit the coasts
of Barbados
The Barbados International College Fair not only represented the cultural
dynamics of an increasingly revenue-generating model for international
education but it also served, ironically, to exposed the distance between the
global imagination and ambitions of the students and their slender material
capacity to secure the professional futures they were seeking via highly
expensive training in North American institutions. Students really faced
difficult choices that were not addressed in the informational sessions offered
by the recruiters. They would either have to fall back on slender family
resources or student loans. Or they would have to very rigorously apply
themselves and hope that a fierce work ethic and their smarts would garner
them one of the highly competitive scholarships offered by the Barbados
government. This constituted, then, a calculative project that in turn involved
the navigation between parallel curricula: the humanities and natural science
emphasis of the school and the entrepreneurial curriculum linked to business,
law and economics and digital media studies that marked a new type of
aspiration, and indeed a new type of school subject coming of Old Cloisters and
Ardent Arbors. Students within this logic were orienting away from England
and more directly to North America. The students were trying very hard to
catch up with the demands of the new world. Pursuing parallel curricula meant
in practice that the students would have to learn how to navigate the schools
liberal arts/humanities collection code even as they sought to put together their
own neoliberal calculative project defined around business studies. Elements of
this parallel, neoliberal curriculum were often pursued outside the school as
several of the students attended lessonswith master teachersin their
particular chosen subjects of study. Indeed, the desire to be in the marketplace
222 C. McCarthy et al.
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as entrepreneurs rather than scholars of whom the school traditionally boasts
was striking. Most of the students we interviewed expressed a strong interest in
entrepreneurship. One student, Ginger, went as far as to indicate that she wants
to found a magazine because this would allow her to combine her interest in
writing and the creative arts with her interest in business:
Ginger: Well I do management of business, economics and literatures of
English. When I got into sixth form I chose I want to work at a Magazine and
eventually own my own. So, then I chose business to go with that and
literatures in English.
M.M: Why the push to business how then to business now?
Ginger: Because business business well business basically rules the world!
It is this powerful discourse of entrepreneurialism that suffuses the air in the
nations popular, in the newspapers and electronic media, in the language of
politicians and the speeches of government leaders and cheerleaders of the
young. At Old Cloisters and Arbors Ardent, youngsters are making rational
calculations that the venue that would support entrepreneurial activity is not
Barbados but somewhere abroad. The idea of making something from
nothing, of creating a new productive activity, drives these young imagina-
tions. As one student at Ardent Arbors (Megan) noted: Globalization is big!
Megan felt that the island and the schools have been overtaken by the speed
and force of these changes:
Megan: We talk about it [globalization] a lot in our classes because the
Caribbean is very susceptible to it as a small as a number of very small
open economies with the influx of all of these foreign goods they are talking
about the effect on domestic producers.different things are happening in the
world the taxation on the airfares the effect that that is having on our
economy.the recession in the other countries Before we use to have our
preferential markets, you know, our exports but things like that are
disappearing Because there are some people who dont see it [the challenges
and the decline] I am talking about adults here. I am like how can you not
know this!
In response to this sense of the overwhelming challenge of globalisation some
students like Kelvin felt, more positively, that globalisation offered opportun-
ities. Itwas useful because it exposes us to different cultures. Kelvin
saw globalisation as offering the world of convergence and online community:
you get to learn a lot. The worldhe believed was available in the
BlackBerry revolution:
Kelvin: Because right now, right now, I am kind of losing my grades in Spanish
[laugh] and I actually have a Spanish friend in Mexico and every now and
then she would help me to revise and stuff
MM: So, she is a native speaker?
Globalisation, Societies and Education 223
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Kelvin: Yes
CM: And you are in touch with her How? Through Facebook?
Kelvin: Skype and basically everything else.
MM: How did you meet her?
Kelvin: Well it was basically on an online game.
Not all Old Cloisters or Ardent Arbors students want to be entrepreneurs. A
few of them like Blaise Pascal or Floyd Pitts see their peers as sheep(Floyd
Pitts) who are blindly following what is on televisionand online. Pitts
maintained that he was not been, and did not want to be, part of the
BlackBerryrevolution. Neither was he overly taken by tertiary education in
North America. He felt, that except for universities like Harvard, a good liberal
arts degree from the University of the West Indies was equal to any abroad.
His colleague, Blaise Pascall at Old Cloisters, was even more critical of his
peers and their quest for lucrative professional futures:
Blaise: I do think that there is still the emphasis, the enduring emphasis
probably since colonial times.especially since education is seen as a tool of
social mobility and we have this uh this drive to become doctors and medical
doctors and lawyers and what not.it has become really like an oversaturation
of those in job markets now every street you see in Barbados there is
always such and such attorney at law we really do have this drive for
technical-scientific subjects everybody in my class I dont know I find
them really irritating …‘Oh I want to be doctor’…Good really unique!
MC: Why do they want to be a doctor?
Blaise: Because if they told me they wanted to help people then I would be a
little more interested but everybody knows it is the money Because if they
were really concerned about helping people, they would join something like
Médecins Sans Frontières. They are not concerned with helping people. They
are concerned with the very lucrative profession that it is.
It was these students, like Blaise at Old Cloisters and Megan at Ardent Arbors,
who articulated such a keen sense of the challenges facing their school and
their country. As exemplified by the International College Fair and the keen
attempt to build an alternative curriculum, students at Old Cloisters and Ardent
Arbors were wrestling over their future as they both embraced and struggled
with the symbolic layers of tradition that defined their school pasts, and of
which they were the current custodians. In a world ruled by business, the
students are trying to navigate the big up mentality in Barbados,
6
along with
their own desires and the small, fragmented conditions that pertain to
Barbados and the Caribbean. It is through a discussion of the implications of
these conditions that we now conclude.
Conclusion
The story of Old Cloisters and Ardent Arbors, therefore, is one of schools
constantly struggling to stay in control of their institutional narratives. As we
224 C. McCarthy et al.
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have seen, the roiling global imaginations of the Barbados elite school
youngsters that we have been calling the Argonautsare at the epicentre of
the translation of cultural and economic pressures transforming the global
context onto the society and its schools.
As a consequence, these schools are sites of ironic and unselfconscious
modes of hybridity and duality of existence. It is the best of times and the
worst times. For it is the case, that is precisely these high schools that foster
extraordinary academic success that, in the contemporary neoliberal era, have
become the cauldrons of a possessive individualism whose consequence is the
death of the intellectual school ethos and the loss of what Cornel West, after,
Max Weber, calls theodicy postcolonial or otherwise. In this sense, their
distinctiveness is contradicted by a pattern of the degrading of the intellectual
enterprise in the reorganisation, rescaling and revaluation of knowledge that
we are noticing in secondary and tertiary institutions throughout the world. In
this context, too, the international tertiary institutions of North America stand
ready and strategically able to harness this energy from the rise of the
neoliberal subject in the creative class of the islands.
Notes
1. Sixth form is an educational feature of school systems that exist in England and
many of the former British colonies, such as Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago,
Jamaica, Belize and, also, in countries such as Malta and Hong Kong. Sixth form
represents the final two years of secondary education, where students (typically
between 16 and 18 years of age) prepare for advanced levelsexaminations such
as the General Certificate of Education in England or the Caribbean Advanced
Proficiency Examinations (CAPE).
2. Caribbean societies have been historically characterised by very high levels of
emigration. Barbados is no exception. The immigrant population that resides in
USA and Canada is equivalent to 41% of the population on the island. Many of
the students we interviewed indicated that they had family members overseas’–
mostly in Canada, USA and England and other parts of the Caribbean, but also in
Latin America. (See statistics and discussion of immigration patterns associated
with the Caribbean islands in these sources: See statistics and discussion of
immigration patterns associated with the Caribbean islands in these sources:
Encyclopedia of Immigration 2011; ACP Observatory on Migration 2010).
3. Here, we are talking about that middle tier of postcolonial elites who are what
Pierre Bourdieu calls the dominatedfraction of the dominant class which are
least endowed with economic capital(1985, 115). In the postcolonial setting,
the elite schools participation in class formation is one of class-making and the
production of brokering elites that might help assuage the rough edges of the
vigorously competing interests strategically engaged in the transition from a
colonial past to a postcolonial and globalising present and future.
4. The shift from an agricultural to a service economy is reflected in changing
patterns in employment: employment in the agricultural sector fell from 24% in
1960 to 8% in 1978(Editorial 19941995, ixx).
5. Although, it is to be noted that many of the students at Old Cloisters and Ardent
Arbors come from plural backgrounds some of them born of parents from St
Globalisation, Societies and Education 225
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Vincent, or Jamaica, or Trinidad or Guyana but often, too, their family
connections extended to the USA, Canada and the UK. Surprisingly, too, a
sizeable number of these students described themselves as mixedand many of
them held more than one passport, in a few cases as many as three.
6. Many students from Old Cloisters and Ardent Arbors suggest that Barbadian
youth wanted more from life than historically was available to their parents. They
want a form of existence that might give them the lifestyle that they identified
with North America. They wanted to live large. After all they had some relatives
who had left Barbados and achieved these dream goals. They, unabashedly, were
after the good life and the kind of freedom of choice that this life might
offer them.
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Neoliberalism is commonly viewed as an economic doctrine that seeks to limit the scope of government. Some consider it a form of predatory capitalism with adverse effects on the Global South. In this groundbreaking work, Aihwa Ong offers an alternative view of neoliberalism as an extraordinarily malleable technology of governing that is taken up in different ways by different regimes, be they authoritarian, democratic, or communist. Ong shows how East and Southeast Asian states are making exceptions to their usual practices of governing in order to position themselves to compete in the global economy. As she demonstrates, a variety of neoliberal strategies of governing are re-engineering political spaces and populations. Ong’s ethnographic case studies illuminate experiments and developments such as China’s creation of special market zones within its socialist economy; pro-capitalist Islam and women’s rights in Malaysia; Singapore’s repositioning as a hub of scientific expertise; and flexible labor and knowledge regimes that span the Pacific.Ong traces how these and other neoliberal exceptions to business as usual are reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality. She argues that an interactive mode of citizenship is emerging, one that organizes people—and distributes rights and benefits to them—according to their marketable skills rather than according to their membership within nation-states. Those whose knowledge and skills are not assigned significant market value—such as migrant women working as domestic maids in many Asian cities—are denied citizenship. Nevertheless, Ong suggests that as the seam between sovereignty and citizenship is pried apart, a new space is emerging for NGOs to advocate for the human rights of those excluded by neoliberal measures of human worthiness.
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"At last world.com meets ethnography.eudora. This book shows how ethnography can have a global reach and a global relevance, its humanistic and direct methods actually made more not less relevant by recent developments in global culture and economy. Globalisation is not a singular, unilinear process, fatalistically unfolding towards inevitable ends: it entails gaps, contradictions, counter-tendencies, and marked unevenness. And just as capital flows more freely around the globe, so do human ideas and imaginings, glimpses of other possible futures. These elements all interact in really existing sites, situations and localities, not in outer space or near-earth orbit. Unprefigurably, they are taken up into all kinds of local meanings-makings by active humans struggling and creating with conditions on the ground, so producing new kinds of meanings and identities, themselves up for export on the world market. This book, conceptually rich, empirically concrete, shows how global neo-liberalism spawns a grounded globalisation, ethnographically observable, out of which is emerging the mosaic of a new kind of global civil society. As this book so richly shows, tracing the lineaments of these possibilities and changes is the special province of ethnography."--Paul Willis, author of Learning to Labor and editor of the journal Ethnography "The authors of Global Ethnography bring globalization 'down to earth' and show us how it impacts the everyday lives of Kerala nurses, U.S. homeless recyclers, Irish software programmers, Hungarian welfare recipients, Brazilian feminists, and a host of other protagonists in a global postmodern world. This is superb ethnography -- refreshing and vivid descriptions grounded in historical and social contexts with important theoretical implications."--Louise Lamphere, President of the American Anthropological Association "The global inhabits and constitutes specific structuration of the political, economic, cultural, and subjective. How to study this is a challenge. Global Ethnography makes an enormous contribution to this effort."--Saskia Sassen, author of Globalization and Its Discontents "This fascinating volume will quickly find its place in fieldwork courses, but it should also be read by transnationalists and students of the political economy, economic sociologists, methodologists of all stripes--and doubting macrosociologists."--Herbert J. Gans, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University "Not only matches the originality and quality of Ethnography Unbound, but raises the ante by literally expanding the methodological and analytical repertory of ethnographic sociology to address the theoretical and logistical challenges of a globalized discipline and social world."--Judith Stacey, author of In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age "In the best traditions of radical Berkeley scholarship, Burawoy's collective recaptures the ground(s) of an engaged sociology embedded in the culturalpolitics of the global without losing the ethnographer's magic--the local touch."--Nancy Scheper-Hughes, author of Death without Weeping
Book
Introduction 1. Surprising Success 2. Learning the Silicon Valley System 3. Creating Cross-Regional Communities 4. Taiwan as Silicon Sibling 5. Taiwan as Partner and Parent 6. Manufacturing in Mainland China 7. IT Enclaves in India 8. The Argonaut Advantage Appendix A: Immigrant Professional and Networking Associations, Silicon Valley Appendix B: Survey Results: Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley Notes References Abbreviations Acknowledgments Index