The new government of Trinidad and Tobago has expressed 'multiculturalism' as a policy thrust, and a way of framing the country's plural population. This article suggests that the education of teachers will be a key to arriving at a society in which the different cultural strands can find expression. But the development of such a curriculum can be problematic, requiring a conceptual framework that shows sensitivity to the country's postcolonial status, including the histories that must be taken into account in locating the different peoples.

One of the outgrowths of the human capital revolution of the early 1960s (see Bowman [13], Schultz [40] and Becker [4]) was the vocation aliasing of curricula. From the standpoint of the third world, this seemed a timely development in that many of the emerging post-colonial societies had inherited education systems which, according to Eric Williams [48], "showed an almost total absence of any approximation to the technical and vocational” (p. 250).