Kevin Baldeosingh
As I drove through Christian Village in Freeport at midday last Wednesday, I saw children in their primary school uniforms emerging from the normally closed Presbyterian church there: and only then I remembered that the following day was the Secondary Entrance Assessment examination. On Thursday, both the Guardian and the Express carried front page photos of praying children from Catholic schools. Presumably, similar scenes were being enacted in Hindu, Muslim and other schools throughout Trinidad and certainly Tobago.
But if God answers prayers from children to pass the SEA, then it would seem that Allah is the one true god since the Trinidad Muslim League (TML) primary schools in St Joseph and San Fernando regularly take the largest number of spots in the top 200 students. On the other hand, if God is only answering the prayers of the top ten students, then Bhagavan is the true god. However, if the prayers are measured by most students passing for their first choice, then the true god is the Presbyterian God.
Here's the problem, though: there are numerous studies showing that belief in God is negatively correlated with IQ–ie, in a given population, the religious believers are more likely to be less intelligent than the atheists. But it would seem that this is not the case in T&T. After all, nearly all the country's top students come from denominational schools and, when interviewed by the media, nearly all of them credit a god along with their teachers and parents for their academic success.
In this context, the success of the TML schools is especially interesting, since Islam is a very closed and anti-intellectual religious ideology. There are over 300 million Arabs in 20 countries around the world, yet Spain translates more books into Spanish every year than Muslim majority nations have translated into Arabic in the past thousand years. However, in T&T, in the TML schools the habits of mind inculcated by Islamic practice lead to academic superiority in this environment. Perhaps this relates to a ritual of memorisation inculcated from childhood in respect to the Q'uran, as well as the discipline of fasting and the tightness of the community. Similar factors also apply to the Hindu and Presbyterian schools, but not to Catholic and Anglican schools.
It must be noted, however, that the performance of these top students at the SEA, the Caribbean Secondary Entrance Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) do not reflect any general academic competence among the general populace. In fact, the achievements of our top students may not even indicate any real intellectual capabilities, at least not in respect to the requirements of a modern economy and polity.
A 2008 survey headed by psychologist Richard Lynn found that average intelligence in 137 countries predicted atheism at statistically significant rates: the higher the population's average IQ, the lower its religiosity rates and vice-versa.
This is hardly surprising. All religions, after all, make factual claims–Adam and Eve, talking ants, reincarnation–which nobody with an analytical mind can accept, save by compartmentalising religious beliefs. But this effort in itself reduces the cognitive capacity required for first-rate intellectual work except, perhaps, in the most narrow technical fields like engineering. The psychologist Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi surveyed the religious backgrounds of Nobel laureates from 1901 to 2002 and did the following breakdown: 17 per cent were Jewish; 30 per cent were Protestant; nine per cent were Catholic; five per cent belonged to other religions; 14 per cent were non-religious and 25 per cent could not be determined.
Of the Anglophone Caribbean's three Nobel laureates, biographer Bruce King writes that "Walcott thought and thinks of his talents as God-given, to be used for God," while Patrick French in V S Naipaul's biography describes him as "Rationalist, culturally Hindu with a dose of Trinidad's practical Christianity." I don't know whether the economist W Arthur Lewis was a religious believer but, having read several of his essays, I suspect religion played little or no role in his perspective.
Relatedly, political scientist Christian Welzel crunched data to correlate democracy with knowledge-based economies and in his book Freedom Rising records two such economies which were not democratic–Singapore and Hong Kong–and two democracies which were not knowledge economies: South Africa and T&T. In other words, without the heritage of British institutions and the cushion of energy revenues, T&T would already be a savage state. And have we not been slipping down that slope for the past half-century?
The urgent question, then, is how do we arrest that slide? History shows that, in every country which has faced economic collapse and reversed it, the key was usually education. This was the case for Japan in the 19th century, Singapore in the 1960s, and Finland in the 1970s. But the reforms in the education systems were not primarily aimed at producing well-behaved children, but adults with marketable skills.
For 21st century economies, however, such skills must also include the ability to think analytically and creatively. Religion, by its very nature, stultifies such mindsets. Our denominational schools may be very good at producing students who can memorise and regurgitate, but that is a far cry from nurturing smart people.
Kevin Baldeosingh is a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a history textbook.
