<p>Despite pedagogical, technological and curricular advancements in the West Indian language education system, there has been little success in constructively addressing the pervasive regional English language examination failures. I contend that most researchers address these second language acquisition failures by focusing on symptoms rather than causes. However, this study seeks a novel way of tackling the problem, by employing the WordTree design by analogy method, typically used in the engineering field, but adapted for this social science enquiry. The method is used to generate a fitting analogy for the current failing language education system to provide insights into <b>underlying</b> issues, which assist in better understanding and addressing this failure. This method finds that the failing system is analogous to that of the plantocratic system of colonial times based on their strikingly similar ideologies, practices and attendant outcomes. Resultantly, I term this language education system, an edutocracy. This study expands on scholarly works in the advancing areas of curriculum as cultural practice and colonial imagination to provide a different, deeper perspective of this West Indian problem, while exploring the implications of the analogous relationship.</p> <div><br> <hr> <div> <p><br></p> </div> </div>

This work draws on a combination of three theories, dependency (economics theory), the inner plantation as a socio-psychological construct, and plantation pedagogy (education theory) to develop its own educational theory called edutocracy, as a partial explanation of the failure of the West Indian education system in Barbados. It employs document analysis as its primary method of data collection and analysis and culminates in the construction of a model of edutocracy. Edutocracy reveals how the current West Indian debate surrounding educational reform of the Secondary School Entrance Exam in Barbados and neighboring islands will, like most previous reforms, net little meaningful change if legislators and educators continue to negate the impact of the socio-historical context on education in this region, specifically the deleterious colonial ideologies which continue to shape education for the Afro-West Indian/Barbadian with the interests of the Euro-American metropole as paramount.

Despite pedagogical, technological, and curricular advancements in the West Indian education system, there has been little success in constructively addressing the pervasive regional English language examination failures. I contend that most researchers address these second language acquisition failures by focusing on symptoms rather than causes. However, this study seeks a novel way of tackling the problem, by employing the WordTree design by analogy method, typically used in the engineering field, but adapted for this social science enquiry. The method is used to generate a fitting analogy for the current failing language education system to provide insights into underlying issues, which assist in better understanding and addressing this failure. This method finds that the failing system is analogous to that of the plantocratic system of colonial times based on their strikingly similar ideologies, practices, and attendant outcomes. Resultantly, I term this language education system, an edutocracy.1 This study expands on scholarly works in the advancing areas of curriculum as cultural practice and colonial imagination to provide a different, deeper perspective of this West Indian problem, while exploring the implications of the analogous relationship.

<p>Despite pedagogical, technological and curricular advancements in the West Indian language education system, there has been little success in constructively addressing the pervasive regional English language examination failures. I contend that most researchers address these second language acquisition failures by focusing on symptoms rather than causes. However, this study seeks a novel way of tackling the problem, by employing the WordTree design by analogy method, typically used in the engineering field, but adapted for this social science enquiry. The method is used to generate a fitting analogy for the current failing language education system to provide insights into <b>underlying</b> issues, which assist in better understanding and addressing this failure. This method finds that the failing system is analogous to that of the plantocratic system of colonial times based on their strikingly similar ideologies, practices and attendant outcomes. Resultantly, I term this language education system, an edutocracy. This study expands on scholarly works in the advancing areas of curriculum as cultural practice and colonial imagination to provide a different, deeper perspective of this West Indian problem, while exploring the implications of the analogous relationship.</p> <div><br> <hr> <div> <p><br></p> </div> </div>

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