We have to import teachers

Feb 20, 2011 Features / Columnists, My Column

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On Thursday I got a bit of a shock. I happened to be at a press conference when I heard Dr Roger Luncheon announce that Guyana was going to import teachers, because those that we have simply could not provide children with an education in Mathematics and Science. I was a bit taken aback because I never dreamed that the day would come when Guyana would be reduced to such a state.
I sat and pondered this thing. Then I turned to some of the people who taught with me so many years ago and they all shook their heads in pity.
Things have really gone bad in Guyana, they said. We recalled the days when every school had a complement of Mathematics and Science teachers. These teachers appeared to be a dime a dozen.
I was one of the Science teachers in those days and I never considered myself a specialist. I taught at Bartica Government Secondary School in those days. I took some children all the way to Ordinary Level Physics and Chemistry. A few went on to Queen’s College and others went straight to the agricultural field as Agricultural Officers.
Some of them left Guyana to become medical personnel in St Lucia and three of them became Mathematics and Science teachers. I also recalled that in those days the primary school teachers taught basic science.
It was the same with Mathematics. I recalled standing in for some teachers whenever they were absent. During the August holidays, all of us met in the city for courses sponsored either by the British Council or by Peace Corps volunteers who came to Guyana. We never dreamed that we would ever be short of those teachers.
So what went wrong? In the first instance, the Education Ministry began to recruit some of us for administrative duties and we went because the pay was so much better. I left the profession because the public service was paying that bit more. It therefore stands to reason that ever since then the lot of the teachers was not of the best.
For more than four decades the country never paid too much attention to teachers, with the result that men sought other avenues merely to earn more and so keep abreast of their colleagues in other jobs.
But worse was to come. All of a sudden governments in other countries began to realize that they too were having problems with the teaching profession. So what did they do? They turned to Guyana and some of our best teachers left for the United States, Antigua, the Bahamas and Botswana.
Rather than examine our situation, our Education Ministry sat back. We began to fool ourselves that we would find replacements right here.
We never considered that with the best teachers gone we would be producing students who were not quite up to standard, and these students would therefore not make very good teachers.
I suspect that we would be recruiting at least one hundred teachers from overseas. Now we certainly would not be paying these teachers the same thing we pay the locals, simply because our low exchange rate would not entice anyone from overseas.
When the situation is examined, our local teachers who are not producing the desired results would begin to complain about the difference in pay. I am not sure that we would stipulate the age of the people we would recruit, because young people would not want to come to Guyana after following the news.
Would we pay attention to those Guyanese who left and who now reside overseas? Would we treat them as overseas recruits?
I remember asking some Koreans about their education system and they said that after the politicians and the doctors, the highest paid people were their teachers. That must mean something, because the Koreans are producing a gamut of electronic equipment and cars. We are all familiar with things like refrigerators and radios and other things made in Korea.
It is the same in Malaysia and Singapore. There were two countries that were on par with Guyana around the time we became independent. Their leaders focused on education and today they are counted among the first world countries.
Dr Luncheon recently said that people are beginning to realize that they would get nowhere without an education.
I am not so sure that he really believes that because in increasing numbers, young men are bent on chasing the quick dollar. Just Friday night, somehow or the other, they found a man who happened to have $2.5 million on his person.
The men who attacked him had a gun and they were not afraid to use it. There is nothing that would tell me that these people really believe than an education would get them what they want. I see teenagers gravitating to this life because they were never given an education. The teachers in many cases simply failed to make the pursuit of an education interesting enough for them.
Be that as it may, I must wonder whether the recruited teachers would be made to focus on the children in the lower forms instead of on those who are about to write the external examinations. There is the Biblical saying that we should bend the tree when it is young.
When all is said and done, I am saddened that we lost what we had and now we are without. Yet I support the idea of recruiting teachers.

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