Henry Volney, an educator whose life has traced the arc from colonial rule to independence, has offered a sober reflection on Black Power, the state of education and the changing character of Dominica's youth, drawing on a career that began in a Montserrat classroom and carried him through St. Mary's Academy, the University of the West Indies and the SiFoCol master teacher programme.
Born in Montserrat in 1952, Volney came of age as the Windward Islands were shedding empire and testing the meaning of self-rule. His scholarship took him to St. Mary's Academy in Dominica and then to UWI, where the intellectual currents of the Black Power era were reshaping how a generation of Caribbean students understood their own history, their language and their place in the world.
Those currents, he suggests, were not abstract. They entered the classroom. They shaped what teachers chose to teach, how they spoke to children about kweyol heritage and Kalinago roots, and why they insisted that a small island could produce scholars, scientists and leaders of its own.
As a SiFoCol master teacher, Volney trained and mentored other educators, carrying the lessons of that era into the professional development of Dominica's teaching service. His assessment of the present is direct: the gains of that period are not being passed on with the same conviction, and many young Dominicans now grow up with little sense of the political and cultural battles that secured their opportunities.
He points to a widening distance between the independence generation and those born after it. Where earlier students were taught to question colonial assumptions and to value local knowledge, he argues that today's classrooms too often measure success by external standards and leave young people without a firm grounding in their own society.
The commentary also touches on the role of the church, the village and the extended family in forming character, institutions that once reinforced the school's work but now compete with influences that reach the island from far beyond it. Volney does not present this as nostalgia. He frames it as a practical problem for a small society that depends on the commitment of its young people.
His own path, from Montserrat to Dominica to UWI and back into the service of Dominican education, is offered as evidence that mobility and rootedness are not opposites. A scholar can leave the island, study abroad and return with something of value, provided the return is expected and honoured.
For Dominica, the questions he raises are familiar ones. How does a country of fewer than eighty thousand people keep its brightest minds engaged at home? How does it teach history in a way that equips rather than merely entertains? And how does it honour the generation that fought for independence while speaking honestly to the generation that inherited it?
Volney's reflection is not a policy document, and he does not claim to speak for the Ministry of Education or any institution. It is the testimony of a teacher who has watched several cohorts pass through the system and who believes that education remains the most reliable instrument a small island has for shaping its future.
His account of Black Power and independence serves as a reminder that the two were intertwined in the Caribbean imagination, and that the classroom was one of the places where that connection was made real for ordinary students. Whether that connection survives is, in his view, a question for the present generation to answer.