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A top school no more

Jul 03, 2010 Editorial

On Monday, Education Minister Shaik Baksh announced that the top performing pupils who wrote the Grade Six Assessment were competing for the five top secondary schools in Guyana. He also named these schools in descending order as Queen’s College, Bishops’ High, St Stanislaus College, St Joseph and St Rose’s.
At first glance this actually is what operates so the announcement would pass unnoticed. People would accept as the norm in the stream of the education system. And so it is. For as long as there has been the adoption of private schools by the Forbes Burnham administration in 1976 that has been the order of the schools in the city.
But by the middle 1980s there was a new school that was intended to be the school of excellence. The authorities named it President’s College. Admission criteria were higher than those for Queen’s College. It was a residential facility and the curriculum was diverse allowing for the creation of a rounded personality.
There were those parents who declined to allow their children to attend the facility because Guyanese are not readily inclined to let their children spend prolonged periods in residential facilities away from home.
It was reminiscent of the Guyana National Service that required young people to live away from home with their peers to develop social and other useful skills.
The early batches of these students have all done well. Some have gone on to become professional people better equipped to serve the ordinary people. Those who remain in Guyana can be found in every sphere of national life.
In later years the current administration transformed the school to accommodate children from outlying areas. Many top performers from rural Guyana are now in foreign institutions completing their programmes or are back as highly qualified people. Had it not been for that school their potential may have been lost.
No longer is President’s College the School of Excellence. In fact, it is no longer recognised and from announcements by the Minister of Education one must now wonder whether the school actually exists. Surely, the Education Minister refused to name it as one of the leading schools in Guyana.
There must have been some reason for downgrading the school. People in the political circles say that because it was conceived by the late Forbes Burnham and developed by the PNC administration the current government did not want it around to remind the nation of a previous government.
The real reason must be something else but this has never been stated so that people are now left to speculate. But whatever the real reason, it is a waste of a great institution that offered so much promise.
Even those children who were not necessarily top national performers but who did well at the examinations left President’s College better equipped than some who went to other institutions with reputations of producing very bright people who would go on to become leaders in the community or in whichever part of the world they work.
For example, President’s College has produced more agricultural officers than any other institution barring the Guyana School of Agriculture. It produced a large number of the lawyers who function in the justice system.
And many of the other people in public life, who credit their successful future to their attendance at President’s College, regret that their school in no longer a leading educational institutional.
It is the very Education Ministry that is trying its best to bring other secondary schools up to the levels of the others by placing more and more trained teachers in them. It talks about setting up independent management committees for the better administration of the schools.
This, then, really challenges the imagination to have the administrators dismantle an established leading school and must now scramble for places to accommodate new secondary school entrants.
Questions must be asked and answers must be provided.

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