JavaScript is disabled in your web browser or browser is too old to support JavaScript. Today almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable.

Monday, June 9, 2025

Call for pan in preschools

by

Jesse Ramdeo
2147 days ago
20190724

It is said that knowl­edge is pow­er and ac­cord­ing to chil­dren’s au­thor Mary Cuffy, equip­ping the na­tion’s youth with in­for­ma­tion on the na­tion­al in­stru­ment will give them the abil­i­ty to take the steel pan to the soar­ing heights it can reach.

Dur­ing the launch of her book en­ti­tled Lo­la and the Mag­ic Sticks at the Na­tion­al Li­brary in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, Cuffy said “we have a rich his­to­ry and when I looked at the min­is­ter of ed­u­ca­tion, he was talk­ing about get­ting more ex­pert pan play­ers, he was go­ing to in­tro­duce more pans in schools but I didn’t hear him men­tion any­thing about ear­ly child­hood and that’s where I got the in­spi­ra­tion.”

Ac­cord­ing to Cuffy, the book Lo­la and the Mag­ic Sticks is in­tend­ed to get chil­dren ex­cit­ed about play­ing the steel pan.

With­out let­ting too much out the bag, she ex­plained that the char­ac­ter Lo­la, “was go­ing on an ad­ven­ture and dis­cov­ers an ob­ject, the steel pan, be­fore she didn’t know what it was and she asked her moth­er who al­so didn’t have much in­for­ma­tion on it, so she took it to her teacher who ex­plained every­thing to her and it ends with her learn­ing to play the in­stru­ment.”

Dur­ing her book launch, Cuffy read ex­cerpts be­fore a packed chil­dren’s room in the li­brary. The event was opened with a per­for­mance of the na­tion­al an­them by preschool­ers.

Par­ents who were al­so on hand ap­plaud­ed and sup­port­ed Cuffy’s call to have the na­tion­al in­stru­ment in­tro­duced at a kind kinder­garten lev­el.

Mieve Hare­wood, a moth­er of three stat­ed “know­ing that my daugh­ter is play­ing the pan, I was cer­tain this book would in­still in chil­dren from a very ten­der age that the pan is es­sen­tial to our cul­ture and to the de­vel­op­ment of chil­dren in mu­sic gen­er­al­ly.”

Ear­li­er this year, Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion An­tho­ny Gar­cia an­nounced plans to ex­tend the pan in school projects to pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools.

The min­is­ter said the pan project would be broad­ened to en­com­pass all 455 pri­ma­ry schools and 125 sec­ondary schools be­fore he leaves of­fice.

He ex­pressed the view that pan in schools was part and par­cel of build­ing con­fi­dence in stu­dents.


Related articles

Sponsored

Weather

PORT OF SPAIN WEATHER

Sponsored