What happens when a Caribbean child learns about the wider world, but knows very little about the history beneath their own feet?
That question sits at the heart of Part Two of “When We Goin Do Something That Is We? Understanding Our ‘Caribbeanness’ Through the Eyes of a Local Child,” written by Sherritza Peterson and drs. Xiomara Balentina.
The authors approach Caribbean identity through the imagined voice and perspective of a local child, arguing that education does much more than provide academic knowledge. It also helps children determine who they are, where they belong and whose knowledge matters.
Peterson and Balentina describe education as needing to provide children with both “a telescope and a mirror.”
The telescope allows a child to look outward and see possibilities in the wider world. The mirror allows that same child to look inward and recognize value in their own people, community, history and culture.
And according to the authors, both are necessary.
A Caribbean child can learn about Europe, technology, global history and different cultures while still understanding the Indigenous peoples of the region, the consequences of European colonization, the experiences of their ancestors and the generations of ordinary Caribbean people who built the communities they live in today.
That means asking questions that may sound simple but carry enormous importance.
Why does a neighborhood have its particular name? Who were the teachers, farmers, fishermen, builders and artists who shaped it? What happened on the roads, hills, ponds, beaches, plantation sites and gathering places that children pass every day?
Peterson and Balentina argue that when this knowledge is missing from formal education, something important can also be missing from the development of a child's identity.
And where schools do not provide that connection, they say families, elders, libraries, museums and cultural organizations become even more important in preserving knowledge and passing it between generations.
But the authors are not calling for Caribbean children to turn away from the rest of the world.
Quite the opposite.
They argue that young Caribbean people should confidently encounter other societies, cultures, technologies and ideas. The problem begins when participating in the global world requires children to undervalue or erase themselves.
As they put it, “global education, without rootedness, helps me to know the world, it does not prepare me to know where I should stand within it.”
That distinction may be particularly important for Sint Maarten, where children grow up within a highly international society and an education system influenced by relationships extending far beyond the island.
The challenge, then, is not choosing between Caribbean knowledge and global knowledge.
It is ensuring that one does not replace the other.
For Sherritza Peterson, a community advocate and social worker, and drs. Xiomara Balentina, a community activist, psychologist and therapist, understanding our “Caribbeanness” begins by giving children the knowledge necessary to locate themselves within their own story.
Because perhaps one of the most important things education can give a child is not simply the ability to understand the world.
It is the confidence to enter that world knowing exactly where they stand.