Chapter 64
When Marcus was thirty-seven, Dr. Forsythe from the Ministry of Education asked him to serve on an advisory panel reviewing the national secondary school English curriculum.
He agreed after a week's consideration. The consideration was not about whether the work was worth doing clearly it was but about whether he could be genuinely useful in that context, as opposed to performing usefulness while the system absorbed his input without changing.
He put those concerns to Dr. Forsythe directly.
'It's a fair concern,' she said. 'Curriculum committees can be cemeteries for good ideas.'
'Has this one been?'
'Less than most,' she said. 'Partly because I have worked hard to make it less. Partly because the political will right now is there, or closer to there. The current minister has children in secondary school.'
'Personal stakes are not policy,' Marcus said.
'No,' she said. 'But they're a starting point. Come and push for the right things from inside. That's the only way systems change.'
He had heard that argument and made that argument and he believed it. He joined the panel.
Over the following eighteen months he argued, consistently and with evidence, for a curriculum that acknowledged the validity of Caribbean experience as academic content that Jamaican and Caribbean literature was not a secondary strand to the British and American canon but a primary and equal one; that students' own linguistic and cultural context was a resource for literary analysis rather than an obstacle to it; that the examination system needed to stop penalizing vernacular voice in writing assessment.
Some of these arguments were received. Some were received partially. Some met institutional inertia and sat there.
He wrote in his journal after one particularly frustrating meeting: 'Systems move like glaciers. You can be enormously frustrated by the speed and still understand that the direction is the thing. Direction and speed are different. I am moving in the right direction. I will not let frustration about speed make me pretend the direction doesn't matter.'
Small changes were made to the curriculum pilot that launched the following year. He counted them carefully. They mattered.
The work continued.