Lagging Students

Nov 28, 2010 Editorial

Mr Cleveland Thomas, Principal of the Wismar/Christianburg Secondary School, has stirred up quite a hornets’ nest.
In response to the current directive to all schools by the Ministry of Education that non-performing students should not be “held back” to repeat another year of their just completed grade, Mr Thomas refused to comply.
Maintaining that he would not promote students “who could neither read nor write”, he refused to advance some 30 such exemplars. He was hauled before the Teaching Service Commission and “warned”.
Whether one agrees with Principal Thomas or not, the gentleman has performed a yeoman task for Guyana. Over the last decade, there has been a veritable revolution in the delivery of education in our nursery, primary and secondary institutions. There has also been an incredible lack of public discussion and debate on the merits and demerits of the still evolving new system.
We hope that the strong emotions aroused by Mr Thomas’s action in his community and in the press will evolve into a wider appraisal of the innovations in our educational system.
Part of the problem is that the Minister of Education and his Ministry have never bothered to comprehensively explain either the philosophy behind the changes or how they were expected to play out.
The problem that Mr Thomas has posed to all of us, is that what do we do with those students that just cannot be brought up to speed – using the most expansive definition of that very loose term – after all interventions have failed.
The Ministry, after all, had not just issued a ukase about “no retention” to its far flung and hard working minions; they had implemented continuous “remediation” programmes in both primary and secondary schools.
In the matter at hand, this had taken the form of training hundreds of specially trained teachers and deploying them during the August holidays to work with the lagging students. These numbered 13,500 in the last exercise, when snacks were even provided.
But as Mr Thomas pointed out, “What we did at the school was to promote the children from the remedial class; those who came to the summer school, and some of them indeed showed great improvement.
“There are some others who failed because of their own negligence, so we allowed them to also go over to the next class because when we checked their work, they were solid enough to go over to the next class.
But the students who we held back are those that cannot read and write. I am speaking of children who are now learning to write their names, now learning how to form letters and so on.” Obviously the automatic promotion scheme and “remediation” solution had their remainders. What was the principal to do?
In the opinion of the parents of students in the school – and in the vast majority of the public if one were to go by the anecdotal evidence of the blogs – Mr Thomas did the right thing and they have literally rallied to his side; and this even after he refused to blame just the educational system and offered some “tough love” observations on the parenting skills (or lack thereof) of some.
“What I know we have in Linden, which is very sad, is the party parade system, where our people are more interested in looking fancy, and going to the different social things, the dances and the fêtes, and various sessions, where they would spend a lot of money, but to spend one hour of quality time with their children, reading to them and teaching them is something hard for them to do.”
If this were 200 years ago no one would agonise that some children are doing poorly. But we are all heirs of the Enlightenment that declared we all share a common humanity which makes us all equal.
But when equal opportunity does not lead to equal outcome, what then? How do we deal with the (harsh and sobering) reality that we may not all be equally endowed?

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Lagging Students

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