EMANCIPATION, ACCORDING to the 2007 edition of the Oxford Student Dictionary, is the process by which someone is freed from slavery or some form of restraint.

On the first of August each year, Jamaicans welcome the opportunity to reflect on their journey from the cane fields to the present configuration of their state of freedom from the whips and the back-breaking drudgery of physical enslavement.

In this process of reflection, we are keenly aware of the challenge placed on each of us to, in the words of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, emancipate ourselves from mental slavery. This enduring feature of the unique enslavement of black peoples of African origins in the so-called New World is manifested in a myriad of negative ideas about our authenticity, our inherent dignity. Our capacity for greatness and our essential humanity.

Many books have been written and many movies have been produced in our effort to reflect on the struggle of the descendants of the slaves to take their rightful place in the global human family.

Group malady

For many of us, these academic works are mere collectors of dust on the shelves of public and private libraries. Their authors will get their kudos for the quality of their research and for their unique analysis of the torturous contours of the slave mentality. On the other hand, we the sons and daughters of the slave will not find a sustainable path to the erosion of this group malady, until each of us finds the courage to stand back from ourselves and tell our children and grandchildren about the subtexts of our socialisation in the three most important institutions that should have freed our minds from mental slavery - the home, the church and the school.

It is within this stream of consciousness, on this most recent celebration of Emancipation Day, that I decided to think about kith and kin and the impact of the early colonial elementary educational milieu and church doctrine in which my generation was moulded.

By the time my mother, who turned 90 on July 1, 2009, prepared her young body to usher me, her firstborn, into the world of the rural community of Stanmore in the Santa Cruz Mountains in southeast St Elizabeth, my ancestors had been emancipated from the cruel and inhumane institution of slavery for over 100 years.

My great grandmother, who decided to take full responsibility for my upbringing, stands out in my long-term memory as one who exemplified the elegance and dignity of St Elizabeth womanhood. Her facial expressions, her big bear hugs and the firmness and authority in her voice have remained vivid in the hard drive of my brain.

In my mind's eyes I still see her in the starched petticoats and the neatly styled turban that was part of her everyday wear. In fact, at a very early age I recognised that there was something powerful and mysterious about my Nana. She had a solid knowledge of her ancestral lines and she told me and my siblings stories of a time when her people lived in the 'nigger house' at the bottom end of the Stanmore property.

I suspect that her yearly Christmas ritual of making a special punch which she sprinkled in the direction of her ancestral home, as she called up the departed souls for a drink, was more than a crazy notion. My great grandmother was no flake - she understood the meaning of the linkage to a past that must remain present and enduring.

Against this romantic landscape of the powerful spirits of ancestral connections, framed by the rituals of Sunday school lessons in the old Anglican Church, and the nightly recitations of Psalms dictated by my great grandmother, I was totally unprepared for the horrors of the elementary schooling which was carefully designed to ensure the foundation of the mental slavery against which so many still struggle.

In my early childhood, there was Sunday school but no basic school, kindergarten or childcare centres. The young children of my community understood themselves and enjoyed their childhood in a stimulating environment of beautiful wild and cultivated flowers, fruit trees loaded seasonally with oranges, grapefruits, mangoes, pomegranates, naseberries and tangerines.

There were eight families in the geographical area designated as Stanmore district. Each of these families was an owner of small landholdings. They paid taxes and had titles or other documents to prove that they were not squatters or freeloaders. In other words, our families had a solid base in the nation - a base on which a sense of pride in self should have been guaranteed.

Developmental marker

Another important developmental marker of the children of these eight families was the fact that we all had a mother and father who were married to each other. While it is true that in each of these units there was at least one 'outside child or bastard pickney' whose birth predated the marriage, these rural folk of my childhood fitted the profile of nuclear families within an extended family framework of elders, uncles, aunties and unrelated individuals who lived together and raised the children in an organised system.

At six years of age, my friends and I were, by any psychological, emotional, social and cognitive measure, well prepared to move from the known to the unknown and learn optimally all the foundation skills that are designed to provide us the ability to achieve in line with our individual potential.

Unfortunately for many of these young persons, it was not possible for them to link their pre-school life to the content that confronted them in the school curriculum, which was a smorgasbord of very bad brain food.

The first readers to which my generation of elementary school children was exposed were those prescribed in the so-called Caribbean Series - a colonial grand design to keep poor black peoples in their new plantation of so-called freedom.

These books did not reflect the realities of our homes, our culture, our linguistic background or our spiritual energies. For instance, the fact that my friends and I were raised in nuclear families within an extended framework should have been validated in the content of our first readers in the elementary school.

The only family in our first reader was a 'roosterless fowl family'. Mother Hen ruled the roost and scratched diligently in the ants nests at the roots of the trees to unearth the hapless worms or stunted bugs to feed her five chickens. This female-headed household seemed to have succeeded in controlling the four little half-white female chicks but Percy, the little black boy chicken, was a challenge to his mother. Percy was a bad chick. Percy was a black chick.

I sometimes wonder why the elementary book writers of the period deliberately forced a generation of Jamaica children to learn about Mr Joe, the unattractive male farmer. He had no human female or children in his life. He related to Miss Tibs, his female puss; Mr Dan, his emaciated male dog; Mr Grumps, his ram goat; and Miss Peg, his female donkey; and Master Willy, his pig who was distinguished by his propensity to roll in the mud.

In the imagination of the child, Mr Joe and his menagerie was a truly dysfunctional and bizarre family. It is obvious that the elementary school curriculum was not designed to liberate our minds. It was to ensure that we ignore the strengths of our heritage and adapt to a reality that would ensure that we develop the mentality of the slave.

Mastering the art of writing essays

As my age mates and I moved from the first class to the sixth class of our elementary school, some of us learn to read and write in perfect English about Mr Joe and his animal family, and eventually we mastered the art of writing essays with titles such as 'Honesty is the Best Policy'; 'Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown' and 'She Sits Like Patience on a Monument', 'Smiling at Grief'.

By the sixth class, the children of Stanmore were seen in two groups - the bright ones, who were mostly girls, and the dunce ones, who were mostly boys.

In 2009, in Stanmore I still see a few literate children whose parents are happy that they are bright enough to be admitted to the so-called traditional high schools, and many illiterate and semi-literate ones who will end up in the non-traditional schools far away from their homes, community and support systems.

It is the formal educational system that has maintained the mentality of the slave. Therefore, a transformed educational system must, of necessity, emancipate us from mental slavery.

In order to emancipate the current generation of young children from mental slavery, every effort and requisite human and financial resource must be put into rebuilding communities so that they can help and strengthen all family constellations in terms of the values and attitudes that are prerequisite to a healthy self-esteem during the first six years of a child's life.

If this confidence in self is firmly rooted in homes, family, church and community, then the formal schooling system must be mandated to build on the strengths of the home base, or hire the kinds of teachers who can make a link between the school in its totality and the self.

Teachers must not be allowed to continue pointing fingers at others in order to determine the reason for the failures of formal schooling at all levels - primary, secondary and tertiary.

Yes, we have seen many positive changes in the academic and professional achievement levels of significant numbers of the descendants of the slave class, but at all levels there are manifestations of the slave mentality.

Our biggest challenge is to transform schools into the kinds of institutions that recognise and reinforce the inherent dignity of all our children.

Glenda P. Simms is a gender consultant. You may send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.