Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? 

I’m Jennie English. I’m a Jamaican living in the UK. I am also a fifth-generation engineer and I think I have birthed the sixth one in our family – my daughter who wants to be either an Architect or a Mechanical Engineer.

Growing up in a family of engineers, my grandfather recognized that my want to destroy things wasn’t me being a wayward child, but it was my inquisitive mind. My father enhanced it and made sure that I became what is today, an engineer.

For me and the family in which I was raised, my education has always been a form of resistance. That was what we were taught: in one hand, we had the Bible and in the other a textbook. The two, faith and education, actually work quite well together. I feel blessed to have the education that I have and I try to use it as a tool for my community.

Can you expand on the link between engineering and Black history as you see it? 

For me, having studied engineering extensively, what I have practiced is the first Black history subject. We come from engineers. This knowledge has travelled with us from the motherland. These principles have come down from Egypt and they haven’t changed much. Even to this day, triangulation on ground surveying is way more accurate than they’d like you to believe.

This is why I say, the whole purpose of education is resistance. Because if you know, you are armed with confidence to respond accordingly and say to people, I didn’t appear in one generation. We’ve always been this way. I feel honoured to carry what my ancestors have given me. And that’s the confidence I’ve gained by being an engineer.

As you know resistance to oppression has taken many forms through music, drumming, carnival, storytelling, and down to black hairstyles. How do you connect education with other forms of resistance? How did we use it then and how can we continue to advance the reparations movement using education?

Education has to be the primary tool in resistance, used in conjunction with faith. They are interlinked and both are needed together.

When you look at the history of how education has been used, it was through faith that the majority of us can even have this conversation. The printing press was made so that people could read the Bible. And it’s the same thing with our experience in Jamaica. The people who read the Bible were the ones who instigated the uprisings, if you look at Paul Bogle, Sam Sharpe, etc.

As a young person growing up in Jamaica, I was always told that my education is a tool for our freedom. And so I took it seriously. Embedded in our need for education has always been our need for freedom. And that only comes about by us being educated. It’s the bedrock of change.

When we really know who we are, we’re unstoppable. And that comes through education.

And with that confidence gained through education, we will be able to advocate for what we deserve in the reparations movement. When people say to us regarding reparations, ‘we will only pay for a degree’ we can say, ‘no, you won’t pay for just my degree, because when you gave those white English men money back in 1834, there were no such conditions to it.’ 

The knowledge of our history will give us the confidence to hold out for what we deserve. And that can only come through education.

As an educator yourself who has had a taste of the Jamaican education system before going into the UK education system, how is education used differently in the UK versus the Caribbean? Where do you see the potential for improvement in the Caribbean to achieve what you just described?

This is interesting because my husband was educated here in the UK. He’s a professor and he was labelled educationally subnormal in the UK’s education system. In Jamaica, I wasn’t.

I’m grateful to God that I had my formative years in Jamaica because I was empowered to learn. I think that’s where my love for learning came from. I had teachers in primary school who were supportive of me. I was in an environment where everybody was 100% in favour of me achieving something at school.

That was not my husband’s experience here in the UK. It was the opposite. His experience of education was horrific. Half of his education came from school, and his church and family had to supplement the rest. Imagine a child being labelled educationally subnormal and coming out with a PhD because of his family’s intervention. How many children like him have fallen short because of the education system here?

This was my experience in Jamaica in the 70s, early 80s. I cannot speak for now.

But one of the things we have to do going forward is to make a differentiation between education, which is linked to knowledge of self, wisdom, understanding, and “head-decation”, which is what the Rastafarians call dumbing down of people. The way to get our young people on board is for them to completely understand the difference between “head-decation” and education.

Education is transformative and “head-decation” is reductive and diminishing for our community. So the improvements will only come from us respecting the powerful outcomes that education afford us and prioritizing it.

One of the criticisms and challenges of the Caribbean education system, is the colonial education being taught that is keeping us down. What is your view on how education either maintains the status quo or is used as a form of empowerment?

When I was home educating my children, I actually used Caribbean books: Macmillan Caribbean, Bright Sparks is a brilliant math book, the First Aid in English, and the history books from the Caribbean are amazing. The reason I did that was in Bright Sparks for example, you had black characters in the books, so my children saw themselves in the text.

I’m not usually a fan of Malcolm X, but I do quote him once or twice. He stated, “only a fool will allow their enemy to educate their children.” And I paraphrase it slightly by saying “only a fool will allow their enemy to mis-educate their children.”

As a child being educated in Jamaica, being told “I can”, carried me to Europe into meetings and spaces of 1000+ white men, with no other women and because my education told me I’m good enough, I believed and thrived in those spaces. So, in my example, it’s a form or empowerment, our Jamaicanness as an added ingredient into the education mix, made all the difference. Also, an honest conversation and a period of real consultation of what a “Jamaican” identity actually looks and sounds like is required. I was raised under a period of acute nationalism and somewhere between then and now, key cultural values have been eroded especially with the widespread infestation of negative social media.

One of the reasons for home educating my children was to give them a sense of that empowering and nurturing learning environment that I got in Jamaica in my formative Jamaican years. Put simply, I passed on to my children what worked for me.

My time in education here in the UK, made me realise the contempt this education system has for learners. And I’m speaking generally as there are roses growing amongst the weeds. But in terms of what I wanted for my children, (having been a teacher and seen the shocking horror of how our children were treated in that system and I was constantly firefighting for them), I wanted my children to learn how to learn and to have a deep self-love and appreciation of their culture and heritage.

And in my opinion, Jamaica and the Caribbean just have minor tweaks to get it completely right, whereas, I think when you raise your children here in the UK, there is a lot to undo when they come home.

Across the Caribbean we’re struggling with the migration of teachers to the UK, Canada, and the US, who are offering teachers very competitive programs that we can’t really compete with. As a result, we’re seeing the very source of our empowerment being ripped away. 

In your view how do we change the Caribbean system to ensure that future generations actually repair the future from the damage done through our legacy of enslavement?

That’s an interesting question and an important one. I feel like I have an adjacent perspective to this conversation based on conversations I’ve had with fellow Jamaican teachers in the UK. And what they say is the things they can acquire here, they can’t get in the same time frame back in Jamaica. However, the things you can acquire don’t necessarily equate to a higher quality of life. 

If the Jamaican government is serious – and I will be Jamaica specific because that’s my context – they are going to have to elevate the status of teachers in Jamaica. They need to focus on the support that Jamaican teachers receive. 

The government should pay for their degree or have it paid back for them.

The minute you start a teaching job, you should get benefits like a house and a car, that are commensurate with what they’re going to give back to the country. 

They should give them incentives to stay and teach, so they can address why a child would come into the classroom and disrupt and misbehave.

The countries where education is working, at least on paper, for example the Nordic countries, have made it so that there is a holistic approach to learning. They address the students before they come into the classroom, whilst they’re in the classroom and when they leave. The teachers are well paid. There are resources – and I’m not just talking about IT. 

There should be a safe environment to learn, with well-paid teachers and a host of resources to support students who understand why they are there. 

If the Caribbean is to compete, we need to educate our young people. We need to respect them. We need to look after them. We need to look after girls in particular. 

How should schools facilitate learning for the “hard to reach” students?

When I taught in some of these black spaces with young men that get those foolish labels of “hard to teach and hard to reach”, I gave them gardens, computer challenges, programming experiments linking electronics to hip hop music, and those young men did not want to leave. When I turned up for classes, they were already waiting and were doing homework I hadn’t set. 

Every school should utilise solar. Every school should be trapping rainwater. And every school should use their space to grow vegetables. Let the children design and participate. Our children are resourceful and incredibly creative; whatever model we choose has to account for this.

So it’s not true that they’re hard to teach. Our children are amazing.

I can’t afford for another generation to be failed – children who go home to very suspicious environments and have no food to eat. We need to sort that out and make sure that children are fed and they’re safe before they come into the classroom and when they leave. And whilst they’re in the classroom, educate them like Jamaican teachers do. That’s a winning combination. 

What is your view of the role of reparations from former colonial powers in repairing the damage to the Caribbean’s education system?  

I personally don’t think the answer is to give reparations to the governments as I’m very suspicious of government. But very often the local communities have the solutions. 

As a form of reparation, former colonial powers definitely have to invest in education. They have to repair the education systems that they purposely damaged. What that looks like will depend on consultation with those affected.

One of the things my father said to me when I was going into engineering was, “speak to the machinery operators, they know what’s wrong.” And I just did that. My job was easy because Daddy said, speak to the people who are on the line working with that equipment daily.

So that means those engaged in repair must speak to the Jamaican teachers who are in the classroom. They’ll tell you what the solution is, also pay the teachers for their consultation and give them ownership of the process.  Let’s not make the mistakes that we did previously. Speak to the people who are interacting with the young people and who have stayed in Jamaica. Bring them into the conversation and watch and see the miraculous transformation.