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The crippling situation in education

Jan 05, 2011 Letters

Dear Editor,
Soon the revelling will be over, and hopefully sobriety will return to lend focus to needs in our society that are so unchanging that it is difficult to differentiate the year of occurrence.
Except, in the particular instance, one could only attend an ongoing crippling situation so articulately commented on by Clarence O. Perry in KN’s December 25, 2010 edition.  Perry’s letter to the Editor headed “Will Guyana’s goal: ‘One People, One Nation, One Destiny’ ever be attained?” should be compulsory reading and reflection – by all educationists at all levels (Grades A – E); and at the post-secondary institutions, professional education administrators, School Boards and other immediately related stakeholders like the University of Guyana, parent-teachers associations and of course employer organisations.
It cannot be emphasised too strongly how important a role the last named must play, particularly in relation to their loud (hopefully not hollow) complaint about not only the migration of skills, but also the recruitment and retention of adequate human resources.
These organisations need to confront Perry’s prediction of a dwindling proportion of educated graduates (from various levels of the education system) in the light of their pretentions to be more competitive and to be the (undistinguished) ‘engines of growth’.
Surely employers must express active interest in the democratic process which Perry advocates for the current and future education system design.  For it is their organizations that are left with little or no choice but to accept suspect levels of qualifications that portend varying performance gaps – arising co-incidentally at the levels of managers and of managed.
So that the respective views of employer organisations and other relevant stakeholders should be encouraged on the reported ‘Draft Education Bill 2008’ (How come a two-year old draft, if in Perry’s reference is accurate?).  Employers owe it to this ‘one nation’ to identify the gaps to be addressed, as well as to subscribe tangibly to the development of the quality of ‘one people’ so desperately needed.
It is a remarkable commentary on the priority given to the funding of sports – primarily to promote consumption of products (without specific programmes for the development of individual or team performance in international competition) over at least making matching contributions to, for example, the University of Guyana, other post-secondary institutions, and other components of the education system.
The above apart, however, as members of organisations who espouse corporate social responsibility, employers should conscientiously attend to the validity or otherwise of Perry’s analysis of the ‘imperialisation’ of a system that is bound to outlast individual political incumbencies, while reinforcing the trend towards mediocrity.
Our private sector will hardly be breaking new ground.  Reference to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Trinidad and Tobago could obtain its Quarterly Magazine (of 2009) the whole of which was devoted to that organisation’s commitment to being an integral part of that country’s education system so that its local counterpart would have a good example to follow.
E B John

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