By Gordon Barlow

The Cayman News Service website has brought true freedom of speech to Cayman, since anonymous posters can’t be held to account.

Expats can get their feelings off their chests without fear of being deported; native Caymanians can get their feelings off their chests without falling foul of their expat bosses. Private-sector workers can castigate Civil Servants for their inefficiencies; government workers can hotly deny them.

Overseas readers of the website must be astonished to see so much raw resentment between factions in our small-town community – such fierce currents now visible for the first time in history.

Unfortunately, overseas readers must also be shocked to see so many mistakes of written English, especially by persons identifying themselves as Caymanian.

I don’t mean the use of phonetic spelling and pretend-patwa words by some contributors as a way of excluding outsiders from the conversation. (We’ve all done that sort of thing in our lives: remember the teenage slang of our schooldays?)

Rather, I mean the mis-spellings, the confused punctuation, the bad grammar and the wrong usages that betray a sub-standard education in this most prosperous of Caribbean islands.

The fall in standards is not unique to Cayman and Caymanians, of course, but it should worry us when it’s evident in public forums. Poor grammar is acceptable in the bosom of family and friends, but not in the presence of Cayman’s overseas observers.

Like it or not, the world is controlled by people who have mastered their respective national languages. Like it or not, those controllers tend to be irritated by people whose skills in those languages are inferior. They forgive foreigners’ inferior skills, but regard fellow nationals’ who display them as ignorant, stupid, or both. That’s unfair, but life is unfair.


Glass ceilings

For folk who work in manual jobs, ungrammatical speech and writing don’t matter much, at least up to a certain point on the promotions ladder. But for people in office jobs it matters a lot. They will very quickly bump their heads on a glass ceiling – however smart they are otherwise. If you can’t speak or write proper English, your chances of promotion are pretty slim – especially in the professional sector.

There are regular public reports of qualified Caymanians (academically qualified, that is) being turned down for jobs in the fields of law, accountancy, banking and investment. Well, the very first thing those Caymanians should ask themselves is, “Is my English up to scratch?” Sometimes it is: sometimes it isn’t.

Quite a few contributors to the CNS forums are grammatically challenged, on the evidence of their postings. They seem to be the chief complainers about glass ceilings. I wonder why.

The blame for low standards of English can be laid at many doors, but the responsibility lies with the state’s education strategy. Unfortunately, the strategy is usually biased in favour of children who are clever at passing exams – and that is the case in Cayman. The number of college graduates each year is reckoned to be more important than the level of literacy of everybody else.

Think of this. Some children are so far behind their peers when they enter kindergarten that they never catch up. Some teachers will frankly say that they can tell at age five who the high-school drop-outs and/or criminals will be. What a terrible state of affairs.

There have been many recommendations over the years on how to improve the situation, and some efforts to raise the general standards. There is a mentoring program. The Chamber of Commerce offers week-long courses in basic English. There are private coaches. But those efforts are a drop in the ocean.


Persons of influence

Maybe what MLAs should do is insist that all child-minders be literate, including domestic helpers in homes with children. Ah, but logic might require them to be given tenure as a reward, and that would never do.

For some years I chaired the Chamber of Commerce’s Education Committee, and one of our aims was to minimise adult illiteracy. Ah, but we were told that the government Community College had the matter under control and would we please back off. Ohhh-kay. How has that worked out?

I once sat on a High School PTA sub-committee which recommended that convicted drug-dealers be banned from the campus and have their photos posted on the Notice Board. Ah, but drug-dealers were (and are) persons of influence in the community, and the School’s headmaster received orders from above to close down the committee. Look how that worked out.

With its small population, Cayman can’t afford to ignore the talents of half its citizens, trapped below glass ceilings for want of a sensible education strategy. The complainers can’t afford to waste time bitching about competition from foreigners. What they should be doing instead is urging their MLAs to improve school standards of reading, writing and speech, and improving their own.

What Cayman needs is not more schools or fancier schools or smaller classes, but a strategic program aimed at achieving a decent level of literacy. I learned to read, write and speak from my mother at first, then for four years in a school that comprised a one-room shack without electricity, and an out-house. An inexperienced teacher taught twelve of us in four age-groups.

Some older Caymanians can identify with that experience – and most of them probably read, write and speak better than their grandchildren.

Our schools’ strategy called for the teaching of proper grammar, proper spelling, proper punctuation, and proper word meanings. How bad do things have to get before we return to that?