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<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=1 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR><TD><SPAN class=TopStory>Education legend Buxton Thompson awarded CD</SPAN>
<SPAN class=Subheadline></SPAN></TD></TR><TR><TD>Ken Chaplin
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
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</TD></TR><TR><TD><SPAN class=Description>Ken Chaplin</SPAN></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><P class=StoryText align=justify>Thirty-five years after he closed his secondary school, Buxton High, and died, education legend FA Buxton Thompson yesterday was awarded the national title Commander of the Order of Distinction (CD) by the government of Jamaica for outstanding service in the field of education. The posthumous award was made on the nomination of the Custos of St Andrew Canon Weeville Gordon, Senator Anthony Johnson and Dr Horacio Dunn, former president of the Buxton High School Past Students' Foundation.<P class=StoryText align=justify>Buxton Thompson founded the school in 1937 and became its first principal. He opened it with five students in one of the rooms in a house in which he lived at the corner of Windward Road and Cleveland Road in Kingston. He took those five students under his wing, taught them most academic subjects and took them into the world of the Cambridge School Certificate. Four of them passed the examination. As news of this success spread, more and more young people began applying to attend the school. Soon it was taking up every room in the building and by 1960 had outgrown its quarters, having more than 400 children on roll.<P class=StoryText align=justify>According to Professor Barry Chevannes in his FA Buxton Thompson Lecture last year at King's House, "Getting it Right: Education and the Crisis in Socialisation", in the days when the school was opened, "Children of the rural folk and urban working class went to elementary school until they left school. With the Third Jamaica Local, they could perhaps enter into training for lower rungs of teaching, nursing, paramedical, agricultural extension professions, and the local government service. Children of the professional and urban middle classes, on the other hand, did not go to elementary school. They went to prep school where they were groomed for the prestigious fee-paying high school, which accepted them from the early age of 10, but no later than age 12. After five years they sat the Senior Cambridge Examination, the certification into the civil service, banking and private sectors, and after seven years the Higher Schools Certificate Exam, the passport to all forms of higher education."<P class=StoryText align=justify>In deducing what Buxton Thompson was thinking when he made the momentous decision to found the high school, Professor Chevannes said two things were very clear. One is that he was a committed black man intent on providing the sons and daughters of the less than privileged with the opportunity to override the limitations imposed by the rigid social structure of class and colour.<P class=StoryText align=justify>The second point, Professor Chevannes said, is that Buxton Thompson's view of the kind of education he was providing to the labouring masses was the same as that provided by the traditional high schools. He catered to the vocational subjects such as accounting, typing and bookeeping, it is true, offerings you would never find at St George's or Kingston College for that matter, not in those days; but in making Labor omnia vincit (labour conquers all) the motto of the school, he showed where his thinking lay.<P class=StoryText align=justify>According to a past student, he made Buxton High a unique private secondary school where hard work was the order of the day. There was no age limit for students and this was particularly helpful to late developers and others who had finished el
<SPAN class=Subheadline></SPAN></TD></TR><TR><TD>Ken Chaplin
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=5 width=80 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>
</TD></TR><TR><TD><SPAN class=Description>Ken Chaplin</SPAN></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><P class=StoryText align=justify>Thirty-five years after he closed his secondary school, Buxton High, and died, education legend FA Buxton Thompson yesterday was awarded the national title Commander of the Order of Distinction (CD) by the government of Jamaica for outstanding service in the field of education. The posthumous award was made on the nomination of the Custos of St Andrew Canon Weeville Gordon, Senator Anthony Johnson and Dr Horacio Dunn, former president of the Buxton High School Past Students' Foundation.<P class=StoryText align=justify>Buxton Thompson founded the school in 1937 and became its first principal. He opened it with five students in one of the rooms in a house in which he lived at the corner of Windward Road and Cleveland Road in Kingston. He took those five students under his wing, taught them most academic subjects and took them into the world of the Cambridge School Certificate. Four of them passed the examination. As news of this success spread, more and more young people began applying to attend the school. Soon it was taking up every room in the building and by 1960 had outgrown its quarters, having more than 400 children on roll.<P class=StoryText align=justify>According to Professor Barry Chevannes in his FA Buxton Thompson Lecture last year at King's House, "Getting it Right: Education and the Crisis in Socialisation", in the days when the school was opened, "Children of the rural folk and urban working class went to elementary school until they left school. With the Third Jamaica Local, they could perhaps enter into training for lower rungs of teaching, nursing, paramedical, agricultural extension professions, and the local government service. Children of the professional and urban middle classes, on the other hand, did not go to elementary school. They went to prep school where they were groomed for the prestigious fee-paying high school, which accepted them from the early age of 10, but no later than age 12. After five years they sat the Senior Cambridge Examination, the certification into the civil service, banking and private sectors, and after seven years the Higher Schools Certificate Exam, the passport to all forms of higher education."<P class=StoryText align=justify>In deducing what Buxton Thompson was thinking when he made the momentous decision to found the high school, Professor Chevannes said two things were very clear. One is that he was a committed black man intent on providing the sons and daughters of the less than privileged with the opportunity to override the limitations imposed by the rigid social structure of class and colour.<P class=StoryText align=justify>The second point, Professor Chevannes said, is that Buxton Thompson's view of the kind of education he was providing to the labouring masses was the same as that provided by the traditional high schools. He catered to the vocational subjects such as accounting, typing and bookeeping, it is true, offerings you would never find at St George's or Kingston College for that matter, not in those days; but in making Labor omnia vincit (labour conquers all) the motto of the school, he showed where his thinking lay.<P class=StoryText align=justify>According to a past student, he made Buxton High a unique private secondary school where hard work was the order of the day. There was no age limit for students and this was particularly helpful to late developers and others who had finished el