Some became ardent Caribbean regionalists, advocating the unification of the Caribbean from points of vantage within it. Others became outright internationalists making eye-catching careers particularly in the United States, Canada, and Britain but also in Africa and in places as surprising as Papua New Guinea.

It is interesting to ponder on the fact that both Forbes Burnham and Cheddie Jagan took the intellectual discipline of the old Queen’s but not its ideological underpinnings. So did Martin Carter, whose poetry shows how much classical and English literature he imbibed, how fascinated he was by biology, physics and chemistry at Queen's and how he made use of them in ways that his teachers would never have dreamed of, and would, most likely, have found appalling.

That metamorphosis was one of the greatest achievements of Queen's alumni, the ability to decontextualise what they were offered in the class room and by the school's culture and position the material in different, larger, more liberating contexts; a veritable feat of penetration and imagination. What they did was to deconstruct the intellectual contents of the old order and by using some of its methodology construct a new one.

We know what we can do because we know what we have done. We are in a new ball game now as far as education in Guyana or in the world at large is concerned. Certainly we cannot replicate the Queen's of the Sanger-Davies or the Hetram or the Yhap era.

But one thing is clear; if secondary education in Guyana is to recover efficiency, effectiveness and respectability; if it is going to prepare Guyanese youth for a world that is highly globalised, and for some nations threateningly so, then there will have to be flagship schools to point the way. And I believe that Queen's is well placed to be one of those schools.

As members of the Queen's diaspora, we have considerable, but as yet largely unused, clout. The governments of small countries with large diasporas nowadays are pretty receptive to the views and concerns of their diasporas especially when they are well organised, thoughtful and realistic in their recommendations and back their concerns with savvy, expertise, financial clout and useful connections.

As a first step we want to see a new Queen's arise

from the ashes of the old. And it is obvious that we have to beam all our persuasive powers on the Government of Guyana to have that happen. But let us assume it does happen; I am convinced that we still have a lot of work to do. We cannot take Queen's back into its "glorious past," its high noon under Sanger-Davies. But we may be able to transform it to respond to the needs of the age without weakening its commitment to excellence.

If we of the diaspora play our cards well, we might manage to persuade the government to constitute Queen's as testing ground for new concepts and new methodologies in education relevant to a developing country the size of Guyana. In short, a laboratory where new currents are validated, modified or discarded by application.

This could well involve taking some of the choicest of our traditions and marrying them to contemporary concepts so that what is valuable in the old is carried forward into the new.

For instance, the curriculum in Sanger-Davies' day was based on the concept that the best specialist is first a good generalist. That concept has matured into interdisciplinary education. Many of the most experienced educators, as well as seasoned practitioners in international problem solving, both in the developed and developing worlds, are convinced that it takes an interdisciplinary mind to effectively address the multifaceted problems facing us everywhere.

The point I am making is that Queen's could become a beacon for the development of interdisciplinary education in Guyana. And this does not mean starting from scratch. For, there are some valuable traditions to draw on, traditions which could preserve the psychological equilibrium of the school while the envisaged changes are being introduced. If I may use a comparison that we all are familiar with, Queen's would be the equivalent of a "teaching hospital", where the fundamental caring functions of a conventional hospital are preserved, but the methodologies and concepts applied are "leading edge".

A school of this sort is usually well placed to attract visiting experts from a number of educational centres, both in the north and in the south. It could also be in a position to attract the financing to make their visits and their participation possible. This could give Queen's an excitingly useful future; one that embeds the sound behavioral values of the Sanger-Davies era while incorporating "new waves" in educational thinking and practice.