In Search of Excellence

Feb 22, 2010 Editorial

Officials continue to bemoan the penchant of so many of our trained personnel to head for overseas greener pastures. We all wish that this practice could be reversed since we all know to our cost how much our present underdevelopment is due to the “brain drain” we have suffered over the last half a century.

One can only look at the achievements of Guyanese all across the globe and wonder as to what could have been.

Our wish may be grounded in the moral obligation arising from the fact that up to the secondary level the students were educated courtesy of the state.

But we all know that in the modern world it will take more than moral suasion to encourage our best brains to remain in Guyana, much less to return if they were educated abroad.

We will have to fight fire with fire: in a nutshell, it will take more material inducement.

The retort up to now has been that we don’t have the money to send the students abroad as we used to do in the past under the old “Guyana Scholarship” programme.

These top students went on to elite universities in the UK and were obligated to return to Guyana to serve the Government for a stipulated number of years. It was the best of both worlds since the students were grateful for the financial assistance and the country benefited from their acquired skills.

Of recent, we have resorted to scholarships offered by the Government of Cuba. While we have no desire to look a gift horse in the mouth, we cannot fail to notice that very few of the top performers actually take up the Cuban largesse.

The fact of the matter is that those students who have the natural aptitude, the initiative and the drive to top all their peers countrywide have a natural inclination to stretch themselves.

This can only be done when they are placed in environments where the educational institutions and the student bodies can challenge them through excellence in teaching and performance. Cuba, sadly, does not fit the bill at this time for a host of reasons.

Today it is not just the UK that has a monopoly of the top universities – nor even the US, for that matter: India, China, Japan and a host of other countries can hold their own with the best in the world. In fact the top Indian colleges in science, engineering and business produce students who are in such demand that headhunters from the west snap them up like hotcakes.

While we are on the subject, we ought to mention that the latter institutions were able to catch up with and even surpass the older ones in the developed countries by sticking to rigorous and rigid admission and retention standards.

As such, we believe that our Ministry and Minister are on the right track to insist that any student who wishes to proceed on to the Sixth Forms ought to have passes in English and Mathematics in the CSEC.

Sixth Form work is for those who intend to do serious University work and there ought to a solid initial screening process.

And that leads to the suggestion we have made before. We ought to take the lead from Prime Minister Lee Quan Yu’s book when he set out in the 1960’s to chart and lead Singapore on the path to First World status.

In addition to soliciting and receiving all the grants and aid that have been pouring in from the abovementioned and other high flying countries, let us in a structured manner negotiate a number of scholarships to their elite universities especially in the subject areas that would assist in our development thrust.

As we have advocated in the past, let us resuscitate the Guyana Scholarships and award the scholarships obtained to the top Upper Sixth Form performers on the condition that they return to serve the Government for five years after completion of their studies.

This would provide, in our estimation, the requisite incentive for some of our best and brightest to return and serve our country.

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