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.

Curriculum reform has been the major means for effecting educational change in developing countries. Much effort was made in the 1960s and 1970s to change the content of the curriculum in order to make it more relevant to individual and national needs, as many countries, especially, those newly independent tried to achieve development through education (Simmons, 1983). Many developing countries have expanded access to education by building more schools, and educating more teachers.

This is the first issue of the first volume of the Journal of Education and Development in the Caribbean.

Earlier learning renders later performance more efficient through specific transfer and non-specific transfer. 'Specific transfer' is the application of certain skills and knowledge learnt to specific tasks; for example, in mathematics, a child who is taught to add two one-digit numbers should be able to compute problems involving the addition of two one digit numbers.