Inculcating Values in Youth: The Role of Arts and Artists in Barbadian Society

As we Barbadians are stunned time and time again by barbaric and callous acts of criminal violence, it has become commonplace to bemoan the lack of positive values in many of our people.

And so, we often hear demands for a return to long-lost values, or perhaps, more accurately, a turn to values.

But how does a society inculcate values in its people, particularly its youth?

Does it do so by having politicians and preachers shout dogmatic assertions at them about the need for them to have better values and to behave better?

Or will well-written, self-righteous newspaper editorials do the trick?

Will the public publication and deployment of self-improvement slogans be successful? ‘Just say ‘No’ to guns?’

Surely, we all must know that none of these approaches will have the desired effect.

So, how can we effectively give our people – particularly our youth – a proper conception of life in all of its complexity and a set of values that will “root” their personalities and imbue them with a strong and healthy sense of identity, morality and ethics, and a coherent perspective on the world?

Well, might I suggest that the single most effective way of doing so is to deploy and utilise our arts and our artists?

Might I suggest that the most potent response we can make to the social and cultural crisis that we are currently grappling with is to deploy and utilise our writers, historians, religious scholars, musicians, choreographers and dancers, poets, dramatists, painters and sculptors, film-makers, and photographers, and their novels, history books, theological texts, songs, dances, poems, plays, paintings, sculptures, films and photographs?

You see, values are of supreme importance, but values do not help us to navigate our way through life unless they become our own – a part of our mental make-up.

This therefore means that they must be more than mere formulae or dogmatic assertions: rather, we must think and feel with them!

And therefore, for our society to be able to inculcate positive values in its people such that they “think and feel” with said values, it must expose them, in a systematic way, to conscious music, classic novels, great works of history, works of cultural and religious analysis, inspirational poetry, entertaining and penetrating paintings, films, plays, choreographies and works of dance theatre.

The whole idea is to get our people – particularly our youth – to internalise critical values by intimately experiencing them in the relevant texts and artistic products.