Poor decision-making in education has been a primary cause of problems now facing the black community, according to a number of speakers at the Black Agenda 2003 forum last week.

"Educational is so fundamental to the survival of a people that if undermined, it can result in genocide - perhaps not as dramatic as we have recently witnessed amongst our brothers and sisters in Rwanda, the Sudan, Iraq or Palestine. However it is no less deadly," said Eugenie Simmons, the Bermuda College's Director of Continuing Education.

"When an education system is undermined there is a gradual economic, social and moral decline and an insidious marginalisation of a people that results in the social and psychological implosion that we are currently witnessing in our community through rising crime, high levels of substance abuse, increasing youth violence and domestic abuse."

Ms Simmons traced the rise and fall of institutions set up to provide a technical education and apprenticeships and noted that in the immediate years following the abolition of slavery skilled black mechanics significantly outnumbered skilled white mechanics.

Vocational training ended for a spell in 1951 with the closure of the Dockyard school and the failure of black secondary schools to provide a technical education meant many blacks could not continue their schooling.

"The black secondary schools (Berkeley and Sandys) became unwitting agents in development of the skills gap and the economic demise that currently confronts our black community," she said.

And when technical education resurfaced with the opening of the Bermuda Technical Institute, it had to be paid for, unlike the Dockyard which was an apprenticeship scheme and free.

"Because many black working class families could not afford the new costs attached to vocational learning, young men began to leave primary school in increasing numbers to become unskilled labourers in Bermuda's booming post war construction industry."

Merging the Technical Institute with the Bermuda College - also a fee-based institution - had only accelerated the exodus of black communities from the secondary school system, she continued.

The shift away from vocational education led to a higher value being placed on academic education, she said.

"Applied vocational education is not a second-rate education reserved for those who cannot handle the academic rigour of liberal arts education. If that were the case, we would not have had the large numbers of graduates from the Dockyard schools and the Technical Institute who went on to become successful businessmen in their own rights and to hold prominent positions in both Government and private sectors," Ms Simmons said.

"We also would not currently observe the large numbers of Europeans, Americans and Canadians who hold journeymen papers, and other technical qualifications and who have highly paid technical positions while black Bermudians remain unskilled and excluded from career opportunities in these employment sectors."

Liberal arts education emerged during the Age of Enlightenment, she added, and was intended to promote the "enlightenment of a wealthy, white (male) aristocracy throughout Europe and the New World. The liberal arts education paradigm does not, nor was it intended to encompass the realities of economic, social or political survival that confront marginalised populations."

But Ms Simmons also argued that the black community had been complicit in a "deeply rooted systemic and self perpetuating genocide" that was set in train with the dismantling of vocational education.

"Black people in this country at one point were successful entrepreneurs, mostly in hands-on type industries. We as a black community began to ascribe to the notion that it was more noble to labour with one's mind in the misguided belief that our children should not have to work as hard as us."

Liberally educated blacks then turned away from entrepreneurial ventures believing instead that success could be found in employment in the "white establishment".

"From Court Street to Front Street, the black community began to retard its progressive growth from self-determined entrepreneur to modern day corporate slave."