REPORT #236 April 2000
A BELIZEAN ABROAD, DR. BRIAN KEATING, DEAN AT BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA COMMUNITY COLLEGE OFFERS THIS INSIGHT ON THE BELIZE CULTURE LIST IN REFERENCE TO MUCH OF BELIZEAN HIGHER EDUCATION


Produced by the Belize Development Trust

Thanks Terry!!

"Brian wrote with his tongue firmly in cheek........

"Now this is just getting way too radical!""

You come pretty close to hitting the nail on the head. I do feel that I can take license and throw rocks at education because I am in education myself, and have been for a long time. It is not done from any sarcastic or mean spirited point of view. For an instructor to develop a course and teach the same content over and over every semester is quite easy, gets to be like a comfortable old pair of shoes. Why bring in some outside thought that may even make students ask difficult questions?

An old story comes to mind. There was this old village that had a very renowned culture, and the elders and school board members were much heralded by the community for keeping it alive for many many generations. In the school sytem they taught courses that gave the students the skills that had been so important and had allowed their people to survive for those generations. The courses included: Saber tooth tiger clubbing, Saber tooth tiger club wielding, Saber tooth tiger club whittling, Saber tooth tiger skinning, Saber tooth tiger spearhead stone chipping, Saber tooth tiger jerky making, and they even had Wooly mammoth tusk carving as an elective.

Well one day something happened that really tossed the elders into a tizzy, a student asked a question that these venerable old mentors could not answer. They could not even find any library references or pictures on the Internet to help them out. This rather young upstart student, whose name just happened to be Val something or the other, raised his hand. The old bearded professor said, "Yes Mr. Val, what is your question." Val stood up and said, " Sir, we have studied hard for years now and have learned all this stuff about these saber tooth tiger activities; we have had practice with clubbing each other, chopping up pukunobwi tree trunks with machetes to make clubs, skinning cats in the lab and tanning their hides in the sun, thin slicing the venison that the faculty get to dine on in the cafeteria, and look at that huge pile of stone spearheads stacked up out in the school yard, but please tell us Sir, just what is a saber tooth tiger?"

Perseveration, or to perseverate = to continue to perform an act or function after it ceases to have meaning. Unfortunately, we see this all to often in our educational systems. When the mentally disabled do this we medicate them, when a professor does it they are granted tenure!

Just my 2sense - Dean BK

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