We need to fix our education system before it breaks us all JUNE 11, 2013 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER LETTERS DEAR EDITOR, The National Grade Six Assessment results are out and students and their families all across the nation are preparing for the transition from primary to secondary school. Several commentators, politicians and educators have posited on the state of education and the cost to parents who want to ensure that their child/children get into one of the five top schools in the nation; Queen’s College, The Bishops’ High School, St. Stanislaus College, St. Rose’s High School and President’s College. However what should be extremely alarming is the fact that almost fifty years after Guyana achieved independence and after hundreds of billions of dollars spent in the education sector, Guyana still can only boast of five top secondary schools, four that are located in the City of Georgetown and all in the county of Demerara. This single fact is indicative of a pattern of under-development in all sectors, which has bedeviled citizens for several decades. For even as politicians and political parties boast about being champion of this and best of that, the truth lies right before us when one examines the facts. In 1968 when I wrote the Common Entrance examination there were four top secondary schools in Guyana. Guyana, a newly independent nation had one international Airport; one road from the city of Georgetown to that airport; one major seaport – Port Georgetown; one major road on both banks of the Demerara River and the same for the Essequibo River, and the same for the Berbice River and the Corentyne; one University; one teachers training college. Nothing has changed. The major industries are the same – sugar, rice, bauxite, gold, timber and diamonds – all of which fifty years later are still being produced as primary products. Going back to the education sector, if one takes a closer examination the situation gets even more troubling. Over fifty years ago when many of the schools that still exist today were established, the goal of education was different. The denominational schools and the few government schools were geared to produce clerks and servants for the jobs in the civil service, not the scientists and engineers that are needed today. The occasional Doctors, Lawyers and Engineers who came out of that system were the exception and not the norm. Today, fifty years later, children still attend school in buildings that are not conducive to learning, schools where teachers are not properly trained or equipped to teach and curricula that lack the creativity necessary for educating the 21st century student. As is the norm, when confronted with some of these inconvenient truths, the first line of defence is usually a parade of governmental facts and figures. That data however does not mask the fact that everyday twenty-four students drop out of school in Guyana. It cannot mask the fact that we are sitting on a time bomb, because a large percentage of our youth population is unemployed and a significant percentage un-employable. The system is clearly broken and the government of the day is clearly out of its depth or unprepared to commit the kind of capital that it will take to fix the problems facing education in Guyana. It is an inconvenient truth that in Guyana the sons and daughters of the rich, who can afford to send their children to private schools and pay the exorbitant fees for all manner of extra lessons, are guaranteed a superior quality of education. It is also true that the children of the working class and what passes for the middle class are forced to attend schools that are poorly staffed, poorly equipped, schools that were built decades ago with no running water, no science labs, no computer labs, no audio-video equipment, no libraries, gymnasiums, campuses cluttered with grass and garbage, staffed with unmotivated and poorly paid teachers. This is the state of education in Guyana today. While the Minister of Education, who was fortunate to attend one of the five top schools, boasts of “accomplishments”, the system is failing. The system failed the students fetching firewood at Kato (posed or not), the system has failed the child from Anna Regina who must travel to Georgetown to attend Queen’s College, the system has failed the Guyanese professional teacher who because of poor pay at home opts to teach abroad; the system has failed the youngsters who must endure primitive learning conditions in this the first quarter of the twenty-first century. My generation came of age in an independent Guyana. Born in British Guiana we were still in primary school when our country gained independence, ours was the generation dubbed the new Guyana man and woman. We were the beneficiaries of free education from nursery to university and most of us did very well, however today, almost fifty years later, one would be hard pressed to find members of this highly educated generation of Guyanese living in Guyana (and there is a reason for that). Our education system just like our system of government is broken; we need to fix it, before it breaks us all. Mark Archer
Posted on: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:30:16 +0000
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