Alfred E. Osborne. Osborne’s father had left Antigua to work on the Canal in 1911, and two years later he sent for his family, including his five-year-old son, Alfred. The elder Osborne rose in the colored schools to the rank of principal, and he made sure his son Alfred received a good education while attending the colored school on the Zone. In 1924 he sent Alfred to live with an uncle in Chicago so that he could attend high school. Alfred graduated second in his class at Hyde Park in 1928 and entered the University of Chicago, where he tried a number of majors before settling on Spanish literature. He worked straight through the summer and graduated in a little more than three years.
Osborne’s studies in Chicago changed and inspired him. Because of his long residence there, he took out U.S. citizenship, became accustomed to American manners and attitudes, and generally lost his boyhood Episcopalian faith. A number of studies excited him, but a freshman honors course, “Nature of the World and of Man,” made him appreciate the Renaissance ideal of broad education. Teaching became his way to synthesize the extraordinary learning experience he had received in Chicago.
The new school movement dominated educational philosophy in the U.S. during Osborne’s residence, and he became its apostle in Panama. Osborne returned to Panama in early 1932 and applied for a teaching position with the canal. His father had been promised that Alfred would go on the gold roll because he was a U.S. citizen, but the white acting superintendent proposed starting him at the lowest silver wage instead. Osborne won appointment at the top of the silver scale and five years later, by threatening to quit, he got himself transferred to the gold roll. Given racial and gold-silver prejudices of the time, Osborne’s advancement paid high tribute to his qualities. In early 1935 he became principal and sole instructor of the La Boca Normal School. He then returned to the U.S. every summer to attend Columbia University Teachers College, where he eventually earned his master’s degree.
The first La Boca Normal class he conducted ran from January 1935 to June 1938 and graduated thirty-seven teachers. This group of students, all under twenty-five years of age (Criollos), will contain the next generation of leaders of the West Indian community and also marked the rise to prominence of its instructor.
In early 1938, Osborne and two of his associates would write a curriculum guide, which served for the next generation of teachers. The guide summarized the techniques and materials they had worked with in the preceding three years. The unit of social adjustment stressed the cosmopolitan character of Panama and teachers’ responsibility to help children get along but also to preserve group identity. The economic unit suggested contrasting the pseudo-socialistic organization of the Canal with capitalistic Panama. It noted that in an economy dominated by trade, their role should be to provide services. The section on citizenship noted that the children in the colored schools enjoyed Panamanian nationality and needed to know more about their native country. Geography, history, social studies, culture, and language needed emphasis. The guide went on to develop the concept of world citizenship, an inspired attempt to understand the place of the WIs in a larger sense. Osborne and his associates could not rule out the possibility of moving on again with the Diaspora, so the idea of world citizenship proved especially relevant. They ended the guide with a catalogue of leisure activities and sports in which the first generation excelled. New school philosophy held that constructive pastime promoted growth and development long after formal schooling ended.
Taken together, the La Boca Normal class and the publication of the guide signaled the rise of first-generation black Panamanians to responsible positions and a subtle subversion of Canal administrators’ plans for the colored schools. Osborne served as an outside agent and catalyst, because he did not belong fully to any group (not of the Silvermen or Criollos’ generation) Canal officials preferred not to give the colored children a good education but rather the minimum necessary to make them efficient employees. But Osborne and his students certainly did not accept that goal, nor did the West Indian community as a whole. They turned their classrooms into laboratories for studying the world at large. Osborne provided philosophical direction and style to the students of La Boca Normal. Apart from providing new theory, Osborne insisted on eliminating authoritarian West Indian educational techniques. In fact, he attacked the methods of the older teachers ruthlessly, giving the impression of arrogance and intolerance toward the preceding generation (Silvermen).
Because his training had been in the U.S., Osborne tended to Americanize instructions, but he also had an acute sense of his community’s insecurity in Panama and the Zone. The fact that he studied Spanish literature at Chicago he emphasized language skills above virtually all other areas. The competitiveness, as well as Osborne’s dedication, gave the participants a sense of importance and sprit de corps. Osborne himself described the normal school experience as seminal and extremely significant for his generation. He, of course, recognized that as a one-man facility he had to rely on student contributions and self-education, so in some ways the normal school merely gave the brightest youths of that decade a chance to expand their own knowledge. A number of students, on their own, enrolled in the University of Panama or other colleges in the U.S.
School principals and teachers enjoyed high status among the West Indians in Panama. The poor quality of Zone education for nonwhites and the inaccessibility at the time of Panamanians school reinforced this tendency, since the black community demanded decent training for its children. Osborne and his students/teachers formed the Association of Colored School Teachers (the first union activity allowed in the WI community since the 1920 Canal strike by the Silvermen’s generation) as the pressure to improve the colored schools intensified in 1942. They submitted a long petition calling for secondary education, both academic and vocational. Canal intransigence on the school issue lasted until 1945. High schools were built on both sides of the Isthmus for the WI community and by 1948 they operated grades kindergarten through twelve.
Unemployed teenagers had been a problem in the black community since the early 1930s, when they formed gangs and seemed omnipresent in the streets of Panama. By 1940 George Westerman saw their unruliness as a serious threat to the community. In July 1942, Sidney Young, Osborne, Gaskin, Parchment and several others, along with Westerman sponsored the Isthmian Negro Youth Congress (INYC) as a Canal Zone Youth Club. The INYC activities helped pave the way for the Criollos to assume leadership of the community, and it also convinced authorities that the young people could be serious and warranted better educational facilities.
Noteworthy, La Boca Normal became a methodological beacon and Canal management surveyed their chart. These achievements coupled with the fear of racial integration by Washington will then force Canal management to overhaul the colored curriculum in 1954 so that, if necessary, the WI children could make a move to the Panamanian system. The conversion changed names ("Colored Schools to Latin American Schools") and procedures without altering segregation by race. In this, it resembled the switch from gold-silver to U.S.-rate and local-rate terminology in 1948. Officials sped up conversion and disguised their motives. Their decision to overhaul the curriculum was also aided by the Panamanian elites’ view and fear that the WI community was showing higher indices of literacy and education than the majority of the Latin population. The Minister of Foreign Relations elaborated that they could not allow a black, English-speaking person to be elected president: “The Panamanians are anxious to guard against the danger that Panama, situated at the crossroads of the world, should degenerate from a Spanish-speaking, white nation into a cosmopolitan congeries, a Babel of tongues, an utterly bastard race.
Participants in the first normal school remember Osborne as imperious, haughty, highly intellectual, and of a very impressive and grand stature. He commanded respect and remained zealously focused on his commitment to promoting a better quality of education for the children of the West Indian community on the Canal Zone.
Our vision is to build a library room in his honor celebrating his legacy at the proposed George Westerman’s Creative Youth Center to be built in Colon. His legacy and vision is to be honored and cherished! |