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EXTRA LESSONS
To resounding applause the Minister of Education, on Wednesday, announced that extra lessons would no longer be allowed in government schools.
He indicated that these lessons could lead to teachers shortchanging their students in the classroom.
For parents who have the burden of sending their children to extremely costly classes – some subjects are as much as $1,000 per hour – this announcement was greeted with a sign of relief.
Unfortunately, it does not solve the very causes for the lessons nor is it likely to be easy for the minister to impose this decision on the public education system.
For one, teachers will argue that the use of public schools for the teaching of extra lessons taught is an earned right which they were given through an arbitration process years ago.
Not allowing extra lessons will equally not satisfy the need that has led to the burgeoning of the extra-lessons sector in Guyana, one of the fastest growing and thriving service industries in Guyana. All this new measure will do is to push the extra lessons outside of the public schools.
Our children are already being denied play and recreation time because of the many hours which they have to devote to extra lessons, both before and after school.
Childhood is supposed to be a time when children should be able to develop a wide range of talents and interests, but with extra lessons, much of their free time is now devoted to ensuring that they gain that additional help that extra lessons provide.
Extra lessons are of course nothing new. These have been around from time immemorial. However in the golden days of Guyana’s educational system, a good student knew that he or she would not have had to rely on extra lessons.
He knew that the school he or she attended would have covered the syllabus and that the teachers would have ensured thorough preparation.
Many parents, however, even in those days in which Guyana produced outstanding scholars, did opt to send their children to extra lessons because there were cases in which children needed the additional tuition to catch up with their peers or to excel.
Even in those days also, there were large numbers of Guyanese who left school without the requisite subjects to gain what in those days was a respected employment and this extra lessons did provide the means through which these school-leavers could improve themselves educationally.
In those days of course, the idea of extra lessons being held in either the private or public schools was unthinkable.
To suggest such a thing would have been to imply that these educational institutions were not delivering and this was not something that either public or private education providers are keen to admit.
Addressing the problem therefore requires that those entrusted with the education of our children ensure that every child receives the level of tuition necessary to allow for that child to comprehend all the various subject areas.
This simply means that our children should not be short-changed within our schools.
Three simple ways to ensuring this are:
At the start of each academic year every parent should be provided with an outline of the work that is required to be covered.
At the end of each term, there should be meetings between parents and teachers to discuss whether the work assigned for the term was completed in a satisfactory matter.
Secondly, there should be a strict quality review in every public school. Subject masters and mistresses along with the headmasters and headmistresses should be held responsible for ensuring the completion of each year’s syllabus.
Thirdly, no student should be allowed to graduate to the next level unless that child has gained a certain overall percentage, without the school compromising standards. And any child who fails to graduate to a higher level more than two years in a row should be put in a special needs institution.
In this way the deterioration of standards, the root cause of the growth of extra lessons would be addressed and parents would thus be assured that their children are not being short-changed in schools.
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