Persaud: Fighting educational elitism fights inequality

A top economic advisor to the Prime Minister urged the society to address the cost and elitism associated with tertiary education, particularly in new subjects and ever-changing fields of study.

Professor Avinash Persaud, chairman of the Errol and Nita Barrow Educational Trust (ENBET), made the call as the trust feted this year’s recipients of study grants at The Sands hotel on Thursday.

The ENBET Awards, which was established in 1989 in memory of the late Errol Walton Barrow, then later his sister Dame Nita Barrow, seeks to provide financial assistance to enable Barbadians and Caribbean citizens to pursue a course of study that will add to the contribution and development of various sectors in Barbados and the wider region.

During his brief remarks to awardees, Professor Persaud explained that though educational opportunities have generally grown exponentially in the last several decades, with new emerging fields of study being seen yearly, the rich elite within societies have leveraged their power to such an extent, that university and other similar levels of learning programmes have seen stark rises in their costs.

Professor Persaud, an expert on institutional investing, declared: “There is one thing you can say about the unequally rich and privileged, is that they spend much time and effort to remain so. So when our Trust was established in 1989 and started giving awards in 1991, from that point education has become actually extremely more expensive, elite education in particular.

“Since 1991, consumer prices have doubled, wages have also doubled, so people’s real spending has not really increased, but education cost in the United States, university education, has increased not two fold, not five fold, but 10 fold … taking it out of the reach of ordinary citizens. In a way, education has become weaponized in the war against inequality.”

This inequality according to Persaud, is not only ingrained within elite circles of education, but also in the historically male-dominant workplace, which over the last decade has seen a significant pivot towards more women in society leading the charge in advancing their  education and various skillsets.

Though he supported this change in the narrative, he also insisted men should not themselves be left behind opportunity wise, by saying: “In some small way, the increase in qualifications for women here in Barbados and in the Caribbean as a whole, is doing a little bit to offset some pretty strong and profound and still unresolved imbalances. The men need to get on that train.”

Despite the costs associated with education at various levels, Persaud praised the awardees and other Barbadians for still aspiring to gain further education in their respective fields, as he believed strongly that the country could only move forward sustainably, if citizens attained varying levels of knowledge in new fields of study.

This year’s winners are Astrid Atherley, Ana Millington, Zahar Spencer and Varia Williams, who will be pursuing advanced study in the fields of Public Health, Disaster Management, Public Administration and Drama and Movement Therapy respectively. (SB)