In 1970, 60.2% of all ‘A’ level Caribbean candidates who wrote the Cambridge Special Paper in History - “Emancipation And Its Results In The British West Indies, 1833-1860” - passed. The percentages of passes for 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975 and 1976 were 65.7, 60.8, 32.0, 33.3 and 39.5 respectively. These figures show a decline when the two three-year periods 1970 to 1972 and 1974 to 1976, are compared. This paper proposes to examine the factors which might have been associated with the decline in performance for the period 1974 to 1976.

The primary aim of the research summarized in this article was to develop instruments to measure the identity of young Jamaicans and then to apply these measures to a sample of students completing their first year of post secondary work. The examination of the relationship between identity and certain biographical, environmental personality and attitudinal variables, which are identified from the literature as relevant to the formation of the young person’s personality, is the second main objective of this research.
 

Introduction
 
In 1983 the US-based Atlantic Center for the Environment and the Foundation for PRIDE (Protection of Reefs and Islands from Degradation and Exploitation), based in the Turks and Caicos Islands, joined forces in a cooperative exchange programme focusing on environmental education. This exchange between the Caribbean region and the Atlantic region of North America (the northern New England states, eastern Quebec, and the Atlantic Provinces of Canada) aimed at strengthening environmental education efforts in both regions.

Agriculture and the Environment

The crucial importance of environmental factors for successful development became globally recognized during the 1970’s, fostered by a series of United Nations conferences, the most influential of which was the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (Caldwell 1984). “Environment” then became institutionalized, as countries throughout the world created new policies, laws, and administrative bodies to deal with environmental protection specifically.

To paraphrase the sixteenth-century poet John Donne, “No man is an island…like unto itself.” In the Caribbean, we have the sea and the air moving around us to reinforce this reality. Yet in terms of human behaviour, the literal meaning of the word insular remains prominent in our consciousness as we continue to witness decision-making processes in many of our Caribbean countries conducted with excessive egocentricity and unforgivable innocence.

Twenty major islands and smaller ones, strung like green jewels across 5 million square kilometers of azure sea, bathed in solar radiance, crowned with white clouds, and home to a beautiful, talented, and contented people: such is the public relations image of the Caribbean environment.
 

Our desire to know our world is the genesis of all knowledge; our determination to understand and control it, the basis of science and technology: and our recognition of its complexity and beauty, the origin of spirituality. Thus the “environment” has never been outside the ambit of the educational process, nor has its central role been denied. However, the environment, whatever it connotes, has been taken for granted for a very long time.

In this paper an attempt will be made to highlight key theoretical and practical considerations which need to be taken into account in formulating a strategy for reading curriculum and instruction in the West Indian context. It will be argued that such a strategy needs to be sensitive to at least three categories of criteria: the linguistic, the psychological and the pedagogical. Drawing on current psycholinguistic models of the reading process rather than a process of the strengthening of the stimulus-response bonds between graphic stimuli and the appropriate oral responses.

In the year 1994/95, the Government of Guyana (GOG), set up a number of working groups, representing the various sectors of the society and economy, in order to construct a ‘National Development Strategy’ (NDS). The process adopted for producing the NDS was designed, it was said, to ensure that the NDS would represent a ‘national consensus’. The recommendations of the various working groups were reported in the Guyanese news media as being ‘coordinated’ by the Carter Centre of Emory University USA.