YOUNG PEOPLE in Barbados must not be led into the narrow belief that their education is simply a means to become rich.

Speaking at the recent graduation ceremony of Hilltop Primary School, Barbados Council for the Disabled president David "Joey" Harper said the new thinking had centred the importance of education on material demands and not on ensuring the rights of the masses.

"Education today has been marketed as the means to becoming rich. We the adults have created a subliminal lottery centred on . . . becoming a doctor, lawyer, engineer or any of the other disciplines as the means to wealth rather than communal service.

"Hence, when weighed in the balance of other roads to wealth, it allows persons to weigh the options and sometimes the wrong decisions are made," he said.

The former chairman of the Child Care Board said the real reason for an education was to be able to think, rationalise and create an environment that was conducive to developing infrastructural, social and economic strategies.

These, he added, would hopefully lead present and future generations out of abject social, cultural, moral and economic poverty and poor health. He explained there was no expectation that in the process everyone would become filthy rich, materially brainwashed, rhetorically competent but action-challenged.

Commenting on the school's graduation theme Go, Light Up Your World, Harper told the children they were being asked to illuminate the world and that could extend to every corner of the earth.

Bettering the world

"In doing so, you will be doing your small part in ensuring that the world you and I live in will be a better place, released from the darkness of ignorance, violence, drugs, guns, social and academic illiteracy," he said, adding that in preparing for the world before them, they should always seek the guidance of their parents.

He advised parents to be role models from whom the children could take spiritual, social and economic lessons.

"Do not for one moment feel that they are too young to understand.

Sometimes they are confused by the double messages we as parents send.

Harper noted it was important for parents to create early "watertight standards" for their children that would guide them into the world they were being asked to brighten. (WG)