In an attempt to improve the teaching of Geography at the sixth form level in Jamaica, a curriculum development project was launched by the author. Its central goal was the production by practising teachers of a range of instructional units in which topics in the Advanced Level S yllabus were to be explored through the use of local case studies. This project was modelled off the British “Geography 16-19” Project and gave emphasis to the role of classroom teachers. The participants helped define the project's objectives, but failed to complete the tasks agreed upon.

The Education Administration Project at the School of Education, University of the West Indies, involves the teaching of Education Foundation and Administration courses to education officers and principals of primary and all-age schools. These courses take place in the summer and are continued and followed up in the following year mainly through seminars and visits of lecturers to the principals’ schools.

This paper discusses the need to apply a pedagogical model to the analysis of errors in the target language so as to make accessible to teachers a technique which they themselves can use in their own classrooms to extract objective information about their students’ errors. Such a model was applied to the written responses of 386 high school students in Jamaica to assess the levels of their difficulty with syntax as indicated by the proportions of error types derived from the tasks performed, and to determine the possible sources of the errors.

The Cuban economy is fairly typical of the small tropical, primary producing, import-oriented economies which comprise the majority of the world’s under-developed nations. In terms of national income per head the Cuban economy before the revolution was stagnant rather than poor. Eric Williams [24] states that the national per capita income in 1958 was $500.00 ranking third in Latin America and well above average for third world countries.

One of the common threads which run through the reading and rhetoric on education in the English-speaking Caribbean over the last twelve years is the need to structurally relate the education of the region to its socio-economic goals.

By the end of the 19th century Trinidad had four single-sex secondary schools, the earliest of which, St. Joseph’s Convent (Port-of-Spain), was a Roman Catholic Girls’ school dating from 1836. The most recent foundation was Naparima College (c. 1900), a Canadian Presbyterian secondary school in southern Trinidad, chiefly for Indians. The two main secondary schools - Queens Royal College (hereafter QRC), and St. Mary’s College of the Immaculate Conception (hereafter CIC) -- were founded in 1859 and 1863 respectively.

The high school system in Jamaica dates back to 1879. Its history can be conveniently divided into three periods — (a) 1879 to 1911, (b) 1912 to 1943 and (c) 1944 to the present. King has done an excellent study of the formative period, 1879 to 1911. No study has so far been done on the period 1912 to 1943. This paper attempts in a modest way to begin to fill some of the gaps in knowledge about this period.

The economic history of the West Indies since emancipation deals for the most part with the decline of the sugar industry, the efforts made to rehabilitate the industry, the relative success or failure of these efforts, and the attempts also to diversify the economy. Despite declining fortunes, the white minority retained political supremacy, and perhaps because of their uncertainty about their economic position they fought to maintain both political and social supremacy.

The complete abolition of slavery throughout the British empire in 1838 carried with it profound implications for the maintenance of order, stability and economic viability in those colonies where social and economic structures had been largely supported by slave labour. The coercive laws, the repressive police actions, and the barbaric punitive measures that had been instituted to demoralise and control the slave population could not, after 1838, legally be used to hold together the fabric of a free society.

In an earlier issue of this Journal some four years ago, the present writer attempted to analyse the establishment of a publicly funded elementary school system for slaves in the Danish West Indies. Its formal inauguration in 1841 was an occasion of more than passing significance. Whatever its shortcomings, it marked the first time in the history of the Caribbean region that a local administration had committed itself in a statutorily binding way to make provisions from local revenue for the support of a universal primary school system intended for the children of slaves.