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IS THIS HOW WE TREAT THE BEST IN SOCIETY?

Apr 08, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Yesterday I argued that the government should honour its commitments as regards the top CSEC student. Not to do so will send a message that nothing the government says should be taken seriously.
Today I want to take a philosophical rather than a legal jab at the issue. In so doing, I want to expose the serious dilemma that any society faces when it refuses to defer to legitimate expectations.
If a government cannot stand by its word; if it changes its mind halfway regardless of the expectations it has created, then this has serious implications for the level of trust by citizens, of government.  Indeed, if an expectation for the country’s top student cannot be met, then what message are we sending to those other students who may be aspiring to be the best or among the best in the country?
The top performers in any country are persons that others look up to. They are role models for other students. Others want to be like them. They are inspired by them, just as how young cricketers are inspired by a Brian Lara or a Rohan Kanhai.
Students aspire to the same achievements as the top performers do, so that they can benefit from the rewards that are expected of such achievements. This in turn encourages and sustains high standards within the system.
All societies have to reward their top performers. They have to do this in all fields. It is based on the principle of rewarding persons based on merit. Since some system has to be established to determine merit, that system is inevitably measured on performance, and not on some other criteria such as political connections.
If you dismantle such a system; if you remove incentives for super performance and high achievement, then you undermine the basis of justice which, used here, refers to the wider issue conception of how rewards are distributed within a society.
If you fail to reward your top performers, this is akin to saying, for example, that top performers in cricket should no longer be paid higher than the lower performers.
Every society has to have incentives to reward the finest and best among us. This is why the first prize is always of a higher value than the second prize. This is why there is a Guyana Prize for Literature where the works judged to be the best are rewarded. This is why companies give incentives to their top salespersons. If they did not, there would be no incentive to do better and the very nature of society based on production and competition would be undermined.
It is the same principle with scholarships. But the purpose goes beyond giving something to top performers. It is about the rewards that are expected in order to sustain a meritocracy.
I therefore agree that we must, as a society, do our best for our students who have excelled academically. There must be something for them to aspire to. And if there is something for them to aspire to, there must be rewards involved. Those rewards, however, cannot be the same rewards as if given to anyone else.
You do not in a meritocracy give to the first place performer the same prize that you give to the last place performer. There has to be a system of graduation of rewards involved. The best have to be afforded the best that you can afford.
If the best a country can afford to give to its best is to take something that has been given as a gift to the country and to recycle it as a reward, then something has to be radically wrong with the system of meritocracy and, by extension, the wider system of justice within that country.

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