WITH iron-jawed earnestness, Bermuda has spent several weeks debating the possibility of adopting what can only be described as socialism with Ren?e Webb's face as official Government policy.

The proposal that Government engage in redistributing wealth by allocating public contracts according to race rather than colour-blind merit has stirred a more than usually somnolent Opposition into action.

Hundreds of column inches of newsprint have been given over to articles, analyses and letters on the subject. It has dominated the radio talk shows which, alas, attract a calibre of caller who typically confuse the compulsion to chatter with the right to exercise their freedom of speech.

This debate has encompassed everything from intelligent criticism of misleading official statistics on wage disparities (which appear to lump the incomes of some white residents in with those of white Bermudians; if, say, Ross Perot's salary is included in the white column the income gulf can never realistically be measured let alone bridged) to grotesque racial caricaturing that would not have been out of place in the pages of (are "white-whites" and "genetic whites" the latterday, Bermudianised answers to Jews and other ?)

Typically, though, the underlying issue which prompts these periodic outbreaks in a class struggle that's kitted out in racial drag remains entirely unaddressed by the Bermudian punditocracy.

Public education, upon which Bermuda's employment and income disparities are largely based, remains the of local politics. It's the last blank space on the map, the approaches to which are guarded by dragons in the form of the vested, seemingly unchallangeable interests at the Education Ministry.

Equality, as two centuries of enforced (and failed) social engineering experiments in, and have demonstrated, cannot be mandated by any government; Ren?e Webb is hardly likely to succeed where Robespierre, Lenin and Lumumba all failed even if her commitment to the ideal of egalitarianism was genuine rather than, as seems entirely likely, an insincere political expedient.

However, all governments do have the moral and political obligation to try and ensure there is equality of opportunity for their citizens. In Bermuda this would require scrapping a lowest-common denominator curriculum upon which the law of diminishing returns is exacting a terrible toll. Illiterate, innumerate graduates continue to emerge from Bermuda's secondary schools clutching useless credentials that only qualify them to swell the ranks of the Bermudian lower-middle- and under- classes.

The curriculum virtually deems children in public schools to be ineducable, to be incapable of excelling in the sciences or appreciating the arts. It would rightly be denounced as racist and elitist if it had not been put into place by sham populists who earn their livings arguing that competition is inherently unhealthy, that keen minds have to be handicapped to the degree the also-rans can maintain the torturously slow educational gallop these administrators favour.

The reality is that Bermuda's economy grows increasingly dependent by the day on the off-shore financial services sector - which now generates two out of every three dollars the island earns, which for the first time employs more members of the workforce than tourism and its satellite industries. The natural corollary to this economic shift is the fact the number of guest workers on the island has now reached record levels, taking positions that Bermudians are manifestly unprepared to fill.

It's been said before and it's worth reiterating: Bermuda will in effect continue to practise a form of economic apartheid against its own young people until there is an overhaul of a public education system that provides neither the skills nor the grounding necessary for them to take their places in the top tiers of this economy.

Recently it was suggested, only half-jokingly, that the Education Ministry be abolished, the public secondary schools shuttered and the money invested in providing the airfares and fees to send every child in Bermuda to top-flight private schools abroad where discipline and internationally-recognised standards prevail. Certainly the money's available. It actually costs more now to educate children in the public education system than in local private schools.

there is next to no return on the multi-million dollar annual investment. That so many parents are prepared to pay to educate their children twice, once with tax dollars, the second time in the form of fees for private schools both here and overseas, amounts to a crippling vote of no confidence in the public system.

It's axiomatic to everyone in Bermuda (except the politicians) that a threadbare education leads to lack of opportunity. Lack of opportunity breeds marginalisation. Marginalisation in turn begets despondency, criminality and, sometimes, militancy. This reality will not change until the public school system does, the dubious merits of socialism with (or indeed without) Ren?e Webb's face notwithstanding.

Both political parties have unredeemed debts to the electorate when it comes to the deplorable state of public education in Bermuda. And both attempt to tread around this explosive fact as warily as a blind man caught in a minefield. Neither the UBP, which oversaw the construction of this system predicated on a cretinised curriculum, nor the PLP - long-pledged to dismantle it - have either the will or the courage to address this sinkhole of squandered potential and wasted money.

Cause and dismal, self-evident consequence in the field of public education have gone entirely unaddressed in the current debate, one that's nominally predicated on course-correcting Bermudian society as the island enters the 21st century but which is framed in language that was already worm-gnawed in the 1960s.

Since campaign season is almost upon us, it's probably fair to conclude that the whole has more to do with electability than either parties' credibility (or, God forbid, plausibility) on the issue supposedly at hand. All the rancid clich?s that have characterised Bermuda elections since 1968 have been conspicuously in evidence throughout. The waves of heat-seeking racial polemics launched from the Government benches, the accompanying second-tier intellectualising and third-rate militancy, all are more likely aimed at re-energising a dispirited core voting bloc as a General Election draws close than demolishing Bermuda's remaining social inequities. The responding barrages from the Opposition benches are no doubt intended to remind swing voters about the the radical posturing of this Government amid a cacophony of equally hackneyed rhetoric.

None of this anachronistic sound and fury, of course, will have the least impact on an underachieving public education system that remains the wellspring of lost opportunity in Bermuda. When the Education Minister recently added her voice to the general caterwauling, she actually managed to invoke the incendiary spirit of Frantz Fanon (in comments she penned, no doubt, amid the oppressive squalor of her offices at ACE Ltd.'s executive suite) rather than address the shortcomings inherent in the system she presides over. Hers was a minor masterpiece of denial, one that put the opportunism now at play into the boldest - and baldest - possible relief.

of '60s radicalism, Fanon has long been fetishised by the PLP. His ( , a harrowing study of the Franco/Algerian war,has been called "a primer for Third World Revolution". Yet this theoretician of militancy, this unapologetic apostle of violence, had as little truck with the sort of bourgeoisie political movements that the Education Minister's PLP so lumpenly embodies as he did with the colonial institutions he vowed to purge with blood and fire.

His opinion of such middle-class, middle-brow social democratic vanguards was scathing: "Before Independence the leader generally embodies the aspirations of the people for Independence, political liberty and national dignity, but as soon as national Independence is declared, far from embodying in concrete form the needs of the people . . . the leader will reveal his inner purpose: to become the general president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns."

Substitute "November 9, 1998" for "Independence". Some might argue this statement could then be applied to the "New" Bermuda with as much validity as some of Fanon's other inflammatory maxims are regularly employed to indict the old one.

National dignity will certainly not be achieved by pursuing socialism with anyone's face; there's a fair chance of attaining it, however, by ensuring all Bermudian children are prepared to participate in an economy that is increasingly grounded in what's being called the 21st century's overdeveloped world rather than the mid-20th century's developing one.