The Advantage We Refuse To Name
Every election year in St Vincent and the Grenadines, we hear the same complaint. The people we elected seem to stop sounding like us the moment they take office. They talk about “the national interest,” yet their decisions often appear to protect a small circle. They promise change, but too often deliver more of the same, and sometimes are even worse that the losing party.
Ask around, and someone will offer the familiar explanation, our leaders have forgotten where they came from.
I think that explanation is too generous. It also lets us off the hook.
It assumes our leaders once belonged fully to the people they now govern, only to lose touch somewhere along the way. But what if the separation began much earlier? What if, long before anyone entered politics, our education system had already begun deciding whose voices would eventually be heard, and whose would struggle to reach, or even share the content of the table.
For many Vincentians, that sorting begins at ten or eleven years old, in an examination hall.
St Vincent’s education system still carries the hall marks of a colonial model designed to prepare some children for leadership and others for more limited roles. The primary exit examination, known in an earlier era as the Common Entrance Examination and today as the Caribbean Primary Exit Assessment, helps determine which secondary school a child will attend.
Do well, and the doors to certain academic secondary schools open. Several of these institutions carry names and traditions that reach back to a time when education was closely tied to class and social standing. Do less well, and a child may find themselves sent down a different path, one often associated with the less connected, less prestige, fewer resources and even fewer opportunities.
On paper, this looks fair enough. Everyone sits an examination. Everyone gets a score. The results speak for themselves.
But do they really?
I have always believed that we need to look beyond a child’s marks if we want to understand what those marks really tell us. An examination can measure what a child can recall on that particular day. NOT, what a child is fully capable of. It cannot tell us the whole story of how that child arrived in the examination room, in that moment in time.
Consider two children preparing for the same test. One has parents who has the resources to afford extra lessons, a quiet place to study and someone at home who has the time to help with homework. The other may be doing their best in a crowded household, attending a school with fewer resources and travelling a considerable distance each day.
Both children sit the same examination. But they have not had the same opportunity to prepare for it.
That where difference matters.
A child’s performance is shaped by more than intelligence or effort. It is also shaped by the opportunities available to them, the support they receive and the conditions in which they learn. Yet when the results come out, we tend to treat the numbers as if they tell us everything we need to know.
We call it merit.
And just like that, the advantages some children have enjoyed for years can be mistaken for something they earned entirely on their own. The disadvantages faced by others become a mark against them, often before they never have had the chance to discover what they are fully capable of.
The troubling part is that this sorting does not end when the examination is over.
A child who enters a prestigious secondary school may find themselves on a path that leads to strong CSEC results, further education and eventually a career in law, medicine, the civil service or politics. Another child who is placed on a less favorable track will have to work much harder to reach the same destinations.
Of course, there are exceptions. Children from less prestigious schools succeed every year, and not everyone who attends an elite institution goes on to lead the country. They do however become part of the network (The old boys club) which helps. But the exceptions does not erase the pattern.
When the same handful of schools have been producing much of the professional and political class for generations, we have to ask what kind of leadership that system is creating.
These schools do more than teach academic subjects. They create friendships, networking and a shared sense of belonging. Former classmates become colleagues. Teachers become mentors. Institutional traditions are passed from one generation to the next.
There is nothing inherently wrong with those relationships. Every school has its own community, and those connections can be valuable.
The problem arises when access to those networks are designed and shaped so heavily by a child’s family circumstances and performance at eleven. By the time that child reaches adulthood, the opportunities available to them may already have been influenced by decisions made when they were barely old enough to understand their significance.
And so, decades later, when we complain that our leaders seem disconnected from ordinary Vincentians, perhaps we should look beyond the people sitting in Parliament.
Perhaps we should look at the schools that helped shape them.
This is not an argument that individual leaders are necessarily dishonest or that those who attended prestigious schools lack concern for the wider population. Many are talented, decent people who genuinely want to serve. Nor is it an argument against academic standards or the recognition of hard work.
It is an argument about the system that determines who gets the better opportunity to develop their talents in the first place.
Good intentions cannot, by themselves, correct an unequal starting point. And a leadership class drawn largely from one educational experience may struggle to fully appreciate the lives of people whose childhoods, schools and opportunities were very different from their own.
That is where the issue becomes bigger than education.
If we want leadership that reflects the full breadth of Vincentian life, we cannot limit the conversation to electoral reform, term limits or the personalities of individual prime ministers. Those things may matter, but they do not address the deeper question of how the people who eventually lead us are selected long before they enter public life.
We need to return to the examination hall.
We need to ask whether an eleven-year-old future should depend so heavily on a single examination, and whether our secondary schools should continue to reflect divisions that have their roots in colonial society.
We need to ask what it would mean to give every child a genuine opportunity to develop their abilities, regardless of where they live or what their parents can afford.
And we need to be honest about what happens when a country mistakes unequal opportunity for equal competition.
Because the consequences do not stop at the school gate. They follow children into adulthood, into the workplace and, eventually, into the institutions that govern us.
The class system in St Vincent did not survive independence by accident. It survived because we allowed the old divisions to find new ways of reproducing themselves.
One of those ways is through the school gate.
And if we want a different kind of leadership, perhaps we must first reconsider the examination System that helps decide who gets the chance to lead.
