Our hope; Our future

Apr 05, 2009 Editorial

This Wednesday and Thursday, more than eighteen thousand of our “eleven-plus” children – and some admirable exceptions – will be writing their “Sixth Grade Assessment Examinations”. This annual rite of passage, which replaced the venerable “Common Entrance”, is a landmark event that has been given a very prominent place in our national psyche. This is at it should be: for our nation, the graduates of this “Assessment” represent our collective hope, our future.

The most valuable resource of any country is not its gold or diamonds or its factories but its people. But like all resources, it is now accepted that they must be developed for them – and the society they collectively constitute – to achieve their innate potential. Education is what develops our people resource: not necessarily the narrow cramming of facts and figures or the churning out of bodies to become cogs of industrial production but the creation of individuals who can best fulfil their inalienable humanity. And it is on this profound truth we wish to comment.

In preparing our citizens for living more fulfilling lives, governments utilise the educational system and strive to include in the curriculum and in its teaching practice, those forms of knowledge and methodologies that are in accordance with the ethos of the society. We must reiterate, as we have done in the past, that in the primary school level that we are examining today, we have a curriculum that we can all be proud. It encompasses not just the three “R’s” – reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic – but a very comprehensive coverage of a wide range of topics covered under the rubric of “Social Studies and Science”.

We are willing to hazard that if any adult today were to thoroughly go through the knowledge base that is required nowadays to pass the Sixth Grade Assessment Examination, that individual would be well prepared to deal with most of the encounters in everyday life. Topics such as governance, geography, the human body, morals, solar system, etc skim just the surface of the curriculum – in addition, of course to the mathematics that is vital for survival in the modern world. Most interesting, it has been decided that knowledge of cricket is necessary for the educated Guyanese – and we could not agree more.

The Ministry of Education, in explaining the change from “Common Entrance” to “Assessments” in the second, fourth and sixth grades, pointed out that there is a world of difference between “tests” and “assessments”. We all need to consider the distinction – especially some of our older educators. The focus of the “assessments” is just that – to assess the child’s developmental progress as he or she passes through the educational system in the crucial early years.
The goal is to detect aptitudes that can be nurtured or problems that can be addressed from the earliest phases. The system envisages an iterative loop that constantly monitors and encourages the children’s development.

This is totally unlike the previous system in which the children are prepared – literally; note the objectification of the process – to pass “tests” by filling his brain with answers that “test” no more than their power of mental retention. Cramming and more cramming is the methodology for success under this dispensation.
The children who are proficient in this single attribute – mental retention – are adjudged as the crème de la crème and given a free pass to success by gaining entry to the elite schools where the self-fulfilling prophecy is consummated. The others are dubbed “failures” and are dumped into substandard schools to survive until they are sixteen.

There are unfortunately too many educators/teachers and parents who are not au fait with the new system. In addition to working diligently to teach old dogs new tricks, the Ministry is churning out teachers who hopefully will “get with the system”. In addition to becoming more rounded human beings, this new system will produce creative thinkers and not reflexive imitators. We will all be the better for this. We wish all our Sixth Grade students the very best in their “Assessments”.