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The presence of American bases and troops in the British Caribbean during the Second World War was the catalyst to an anti-Americanism which has continued to dominate political thinking in the area. This has been a rather ironic turn of events. Prior to the arrival of the Americans, there had been a growing sentiment among sections of the population for some sort of American take-over of the islands. After the Americans arrived, however, relations with the people of the islands soured. The idea of an American take-over died aborning, and by the end of the war, such ideas were no longer being entertained by the people of the British Caribbean. They were replaced instead, by an aggressive nationalism which called for self-government for the islands as an entity. Whereas in 1938, a British journalist could have written that “Trinidad (and Barbados and Jamaica) wants to be American,” it had long ceased to be true by the end of the war. A Trinidadian labor leader, at a regional conference in 1945, succinctly summed up the ideas of all of his confreres. “Whenever we pass into other hands,” he declared, “both hands must be our own.”

Public education continues to be bombarded with negative criticisms, some of which originate from the factors of change, progress, and politics. Others originate from rationalizations in regard to performance or lack of it, accountability, shared governance, and the utilization of scarce resources for the support of educational programs. Other criticisms focus on the alienation and resentment that many students hold toward school. Those who thought that simple expansion of educational opportunity within recent times was sufficient to the demands of societal modernization have learned, in very obvious ways, that this is not the case.1 Experience has shown that more schooling of the traditional type does not effectively educate new classes of students who are now being encouraged to stay in school. The malfunction of much educational practice, particularly in urban areas, makes renovation necessary. Changes in socioeconomic structures and in the scientific and technological revolutions make it imperative that new modalities be developed for use in educational settings. For a long time the belief has been held that the primary responsibility of education is the development of academic rationality.