Brain Train: Quality Higher Education And Caribbean Development

by Hilary McD. Beckles, Anthony Perry, Peter Whiteley

The Brain Train is the only dependable vehicle on which Caribbean people can journey deeply into the development culture of postmodernity. Nothing short of an education revolution, located primarily in the higher level of the sector, will be adequate. Mass access to quality higher education – the "Brain Train" – is the Caribbean's last chance to secure sustainable development.      The brain train must be reversed to a place where the Brain Train can be boarded. This is the best way for Caribbean people to effectively gather and focus their abundant intellectual and creative resources in their continuing flight from poverty, dependency, and to counter the growing post-independence sense of disillusionment.
     The scientific mobilization of the Caribbean sense of self and sovereignty is a precondition for boarding the Brain Train. The creation of a development-oriented mentality within a learning society is the product of the process. The call here is for popular participation in development thinking and action by opening access to all for relevant higher education. Finding the solutions to challenges faced by Caribbean nation states in this phase of glabalization is no simple manner, but the best place to begin the search is on this terrain. The Brain Train is about education and creativity, not certification and validation. It is about the manufacture of creative minds than find fertile expression in the field of the productivist consciousness.

136 pages, Paperback

First published September 5, 2000

About the author

Sir Hilary McDonald Beckles KA (born 11 August 1955) is a Barbadian historian, he is the current vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI) and chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Committee.

Educated at the University of Hull in England, Beckles began his academic career at UWI, and was granted a personal professorship at the age of 37, becoming the youngest in the university's history. He was named pro-vice-chancellor and chairman of UWI's Board for Undergraduate Studies in 1998, and in 2002 was named principal of the university's Cave Hill campus. Although his focus has mainly been on Afro-Caribbean history, especially the economic and social impacts of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, Beckles has also had a longstanding involvement with West Indian cricket, and has previously served on the board of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB).