FOREWORD
THIS “HISTORY OF MAUSICA” is an incomplete story. There were many Mausicans who were supposed
to contribute, and did not get around to it. Some segments of the project had to be aborted. As long as
there is one Mausican alive who has an angle of a story to tell that is not in this book, the story will be
ongoing.
What I would like to suggest is that we keep this open, and through the blog we keep talking, and at
some time in the future the younger heads would add other parts to the tale.
This “book” is not meant to be sold. It is a memorial gift from the minds and hearts of those who
contributed who are named, and those who contributed but said “Do not call my name”.
Now there are those, who, reading it, and being Trinis, would think they could have done a better job,
quite possibly; but they didn’t did they? Did those critiquing rush forward with ideas and contributions?
And there are those who would feel that we should have sought inputs from this one, and that one, well
we did, through the blog, and some people put their intention into their “someday” book, and forgot all
about them.
I am sending this forward to the organizing committee, more directly to Maria and Joy, so that they
could get this 30,000 word project in print.
Each writer whose name is assigned to an article takes full responsibility for the content of that article.
As far as I know, our recollections and opinions have broken no laws of T&T.
The language of the text as supervised by me, can be read by children of twelve,, first formers, and if
there is the desire to use it as a textbook, permission to do so would be the responsibility of the
Organizing Committee of the 50th Reunion.
I would make only one request and that is, that copies of the book should be given to The National
Library of Trinidad and Tobago, to form part of their archives. That way, when the last living Mausican
has gone to the ancestors, the idea of the college would live on in these words.
Linda E. Edwards
Houston, Texas
27 March, 2013.
MAUSICA: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
A New Concept In Teacher Education, and Nation Building.
By Linda E. Edwards
Prior to 1962 Trinidad and Tobago was a colonial outpost of Great Britain’s, where all of the senior
administrators in Education were sent out as part of the Colonial Office. They were white Englishmen,
with a British outlook, educating colonials to be good subjects of the Mother Country.
The last such head of a Government Teacher’s College, was a Mr. Brooks, at G.T C. on St. Vincent Street,
Port-of-Spain. He was the principal when I went there in 1961, aged nineteen.
Teacher Training as it was practiced by the colonial office consisted of in-service training through either
the Pupil Teacher System, or through the recruitment of students straight from high schools who had
the correct number of O or A level passes, who were given teaching jobs in an apprenticeship type
system. Later, if they stayed long enough in the system, they would be selected for a two year training
course at the Government Teachers College. The Catholic School Board, and the Presbyterian School
Board trained their teachers the same way at Naparima Teachers College, and the Catholic Teachers
College in Port-of-Spain. As the demand for a more professionally trained group of teachers arose, and
to increase the number of professionally trained teachers; the Emergency Teachers College was started
to give older teachers, long on the waiting list, a chance to be formally trained before retirement. The
Valsyn Teachers College, Now the Cipriani Labour College was also started to fill the need for trained
teachers.
Particularly gifted or persistent scholars, could later be selected for short courses in England. Some
earned external BA degrees.
Unlike the Portuguese, who tried their best to smash Angola to bits the night before Independence,
unlike India which threatened to break into language factions even before Independence, Trinidad and
Tobago was assessed as ready for independence based on a number of specifics. The number of trained
teachers, professional nurses, lawyers, doctors and police officers as a percentage of the population as
well as the number of available secondary school places; were considered important criteria for
“readiness for nationhood.”
The decade of the sixties opened with a massive secondary school building programme, that was
centered on the free secondary education to be provided from 1960 onwards. The previous College
Exhibition Examination system that took in one hundred free places, (and the others had to pay), was
abolished on the road to Independence, and everyone had to pass a standard secondary entrance
examination, called the Common Entrance Exam. Previous to this, teachers chose who were to take the
exam. A child could be excluded due to poverty, or unacceptable behavior, or a falling out between
teacher and parent, or being too Negroid looking, or “Too Indian”. A teacher could be bribed to put a
child in the right class, even if he was as dumb as dirt.
It was the remnants of a racist system. Eric Williams changed all that.
(A note on the significance of this change on who went to secondary school, was provided by my late
beloved friend Hollis E. Knight, my colleague at Woodbrook Secondary and fellow student at UWI. He
had saved the paper that had published the College Exhibition Exam results from the year he had taken
it. He had placed number 101, but his washer woman mother sacrificed, and sent him to St. Mary’s.
Candidate # 102 became a doctor, because his family could have sent him abroad for further study after
St. Mary’s, where my friend beat many of the free place people in class, in almost every subject. Hollis,
bless his soul, was one of the darkest skinned people I knew, as dark as my father, so although he passed
his O levels with flying colours, he was not invited back to do his A’s; those places were reserved for the
children of the wealthy, French and English oriented ruling class. He eventually went to the Emergency
Teachers College, taught at Woodbrook Secondary, became an officer of the Ministry of Education, and
inspired students in no small way to better themselves. By the time he went to the ancestors in 2005, he
had seen a number of his former students thrive and move forward. This son of a washer-woman made
good, because of his mother’s sacrifice, and the opportunities provided by a newly free country. He gave
an enormous measure back, before his early death.)
Dr. Williams’ changes created opportunities for everyone. Every child within the age group of 11+ to 12+
was to be allowed to take the Common Entrance Examination This meant thousands more children were
getting in to secondary schools, and more secondary schools needed to be built to under pin the
forward moving country, where every creed and race were to find an equal place.
Woodbrook Secondary, headed by Mr. Harry Joseph, formerly a vice-principal at the Government
Training College for teachers, was one of the first of these Government Secondary Schools, also called
Comprehensive Secondary Schools and Polytechnics, which meant that they were not a doctor/lawyer
factory system, but schools aimed at the broad spectrum of skills needed to run an emergent country,
throwing off the shackles of colonialism. Others in the first batch were St. James Secondary, San Juan
Secondary, Arima Secondary, which ate up the grazelands of some people’s goats, and the playing field
of Arima Government Primary; San Fernando Secondary, located in Pleasantville and North Eastern
College in Sangre Grande. If the new venture in education was to work, two things needed to be done.
Institute a different kind of teacher training programme, and open UWI to free education for teachers.
Mausica was part of the result of that mental challenge our national leader set for the country.
Mausica Teachers’ College, opened in 1963, one year after independence, was a revolutionary concept
in Teacher Training, as it proposed taking suitably qualified students into a residential facility and
training them to be teachers, before they formally set foot in a classroom. While a few were already
teaching, the main focus was on residential facilities, and pre-service training.
They would live together in a series of six hostels, based on the British Boarding School system of
“houses”, where their co-curricular and extra curricular activities could be guided and monitored, and
where team building would become a basic part of the Mausica experience.
All of the expenses of being a student at Mausica would be borne by the state, except as students
needed personal spending allowances. One hundred and ten students would be taken in annually. The
first principal decreed that it should be fifty three young men and fifty seven young women in each
group. Some rakish young men were heard to refer to the numbers as “And four for me”.
There had been nothing like this before, in the development of the country. The college was built from
scratch, under the supervision of the Ministry of Works.
The location of the college was an isolated piece of ex- farmland on Mausica Road in D’Abadie, south of
the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, and to the northeast of The Piarco Airport. The Centeno Experimental
Station and School of Agriculture, stood between the college and the airport.
If you were the studious type, Mausica was an ideal location for study. Apart from the occasional drone
of an airplane, there were no sounds but the wind.
The students, generally, had no cars, and so, could not easily leave the campus to go to the nearest
town, the sleepy Borough of Arima, or to head down the highway to Port of Spain. If you were a city
student, used to bright lights and things to do on weekends, Mausica could have been an irksome
experience.
Part of the impetus to create a specialized series of Teachers’Colleges; Valsyn and Corinth were to
follow, was apparently the Colonial concern about adequate numbers of trained people to run an excolony.
Britain apparently granted independence to its Caribbean colonies, not based on agitation, revolutions,
and overthrow of the existing regime, as in some African and Asian countries, but based on a formula of
economic viability that counted heads- numbers of doctors, nurses, hospital beds, trained teachers and
so on. It did not want a former colony, unable to manage its business, making a mess of it; and then
begging to be let back in as part of the Empire. Eric Williams was determined that we would not look
back. (It is a proud fact that no British Caribbean Country, freed into independence, ever defaulted on it,
though Guyana and Grenada had their troubles)
The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, who led the country first to full internal self Government,
and then to Independence, Eric Eustace Williams, Ph.D.; had received his tertiary education in Britain, at
tremendous cost to his country, and he was determined to find ways to bring the necessary education
to his people, in a way that more of them could obtain, without the long exile from family and country
that studying abroad necessitated.. Mausica was one such concept. It was part of the massive building
and expansion of hospitals and schools that became the William’s legacy.