ABSTRACT
This essay is situated at the complex juncture of the global imaginations of Barbadian elite secondary school youngsters and the processes of globalisation that bring recruiting representatives from North American tertiary education institutions to the island every year in pursuit of potential university academic talent. This educational encounter, and the historical ironies that it generates, is set against the backdrop of processes of uneven development particular to a small emergent society with a long colonial past linked to England now transitioning into the post-independence era. The Barbadian schools that are the focus of this analysis are Old Cloisters and Ardent Arbors. These school sites are part of a larger international study looking at the contemporary circumstances of the British-bequeathed public school model in nine different countries (Singapore, India, Hong Kong, South Africa, Australia, England, Argentina, Northern Cyprus and Barbados). This study concentrates attention on students in the last two years of schooling attending what is called sixth form1 and stays with them into their first year after school. In what follows, we draw on archival and contemporary documents (school magazines going back to 1901, newspaper articles, online newspapers and websites) as well as observational research field notes and interviews with students, teachers, principals, alumni, parents, school councillors and international college fair recruiters to situate the current historical conjuncture of elite schooling in Barbados within a larger theoretical and policy framework that addresses the role of these schools in producing a historically specific type of elite class whom we are calling, after Anna Saxenian (2006), the Argonauts of postcolonial modernity. This is a particular kind of elite class with historical roots of transnationality tied to colonialism and migration and contemporary youth aspirations that are situated within the possibilities and limitations of a postcolonial Barbados. While not necessarily situated within the high-end of the finance class identified in Eurocentric theories of globalisation, these postcolonial Argonauts are negotiating the educational legacy of colonialism in post-independence times that come with their own challenges. For like Jason’s fellow travellers who pursued the mythical Golden Fleece in Greek ancient lore, these Barbadian Argonauts are breaking with an older tradition that once tied Barbadian post-school futures to universities in England, seeking instead tertiary education and future careers in Canada and the USA. As such, they participate in a broader migration of labour from Barbados and the Caribbean region to the USA and Canada.2
