Balancing capacity with desire in education

Sep 10, 2008 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
My late father, one of Guyana’s outstanding educators and educationists, told me in the 1950’s that “most children in Guyana have the capacity for education but many lack the desire.” Your IAN editorial Education and Development of 4 September, 2008, deals with this aspect of education but only tangentially.

In Guyana today what F.W.E. Case said to me then still holds good. The capacity is there, as ever it was, but the desire for education is perhaps more absent than ever. There was a time when education provided a certain, sometimes the only, but most times a guaranteed passport to the ‘good life’- status, modest wealth and society’s approval, albeit conditional on behaviour.

However, today there are many convincing examples that the ‘good life’ can be achieved without having to subject oneself to the demands and discipline of education or the approval of the good society. In any case, the ‘good life’ has been redefined by time, circumstance and example.

Modern values based on ostentation and garish materialism have replaced those more traditional ones influenced by academic achievement and the practice of the protestant work ethic.

These days, how much you have is far more important than how you acquire it. For instance, the money and wealth acquired as the proceeds of crime or by any dubious methodology carries no less a moral value than that acquired through diligence, sacrifice and application – all important bywords in the pursuit of education. With this paradigm shift in favour of conspicuous consumption and ‘dance hall culture’, the desire for education has been dislocated and society is now reaping the results as our young people rapidly lose interest in education as the traditional means of self improvement.

The intrusive nature of foreign TV has not helped. Individuals are exhorted to capture as much gain as possible and structures have been created – from questionable “runnings” to remittances – in which that exhortation is matched by a new pattern of legal, illegal and economic incentives.

In a limited but telling survey carried out in 2005/6 among young people 18 to 30 years old, it was discovered that a significant percentage could not read or write.

More alarmingly, many of these functional illiterates admitted they had no desire to read or write as they could see no discernible advantage in acquiring these skills. This can only mean that a segment of the population does not believe that educating themselves will lead to their “empowerment” in a material or any real socio-economic sense.

This state of affairs underscores the editorial’s counsel that the functionally illiterate should be educated in a manner “capable of opening their minds to a broader understanding of the reality in which they live.” But, which reality are we really talking about here? Is their reality truly universal? And, does the reality of living on the margins and despair have a broader understanding we are all comfortable with?

At the margin of optimism, all this probably means that our education system needs to focus more on creating or renewing the desire for education in the young and not so young people.

In the absence of our own painstaking research and practical investigations into how this can be achieved in Guyana, there may be value in studying how India, China, Malaysia and other Asian tiger countries achieved the balance between capacity and desire so successfully and in such little time.

The task is rather for society with government’s help to recreate the environment in which a sound education regains its relevance and enduring value.

F. Hamley Case

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