Looking at a challenging education system

Jul 17, 2011 Features / Columnists, My Column

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By Adam Harris

This past week, 515 more trained teachers entered the system. Last year, a similar number graduated from the Cyril Potter College of Education and they were all supposed to add to the numbers already in the system.
In fact, over the past five years, equally large numbers of trained teachers entered the system, with some of them actually moving on to improve their qualifications by entering for the relative programme offered by the University of Guyana.
Recently I looked at the figures, and when I did the Mathematics by dividing the number of graduate teachers by the number of schools in the country, I found that by now the schools should have had a remarkably high percentage of trained teachers. There are about 1,100 schools in Guyana, so that after the last two graduation exercises, every school should have had at least one more trained teacher.
But life is never a mathematical equation. It is not a given that everyone who walks on the roads would become a casualty. Similarly, it never meant that all the trained teachers would have been divided equally between the schools.
The coastal schools would have had the highest percentage of trained teachers and would therefore be expected to do better whenever the examinations are conducted. However, when I looked at the last Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate examinations and the recent National Grade Six Assessment, I found that the failing rate in schools in the capital, for example, was perhaps higher than the failing rate of the rural coastal schools.
Initially, I concluded that this was because the city schools were exposed to more distractions. A simple study led me to conclude that many of the teachers were more interested in self than in the classes they taught. Of course, most of them are women. Of the 515 people who graduated last week a mere 74 were men, which suggested that increasingly, young men in school will face even more distractions.
But it was a comment at the graduation that set me thinking. The Education Minister called on the teachers to throw aside the teaching method that sees children being forced to learn by rote. Simply put, the teachers tell the child something and that child had to commit whatever is tossed to him to memory.
Now that is where the problem lies. Today we find children leaving school and entering the world of work without a basic knowledge of English. Subjects and verbs do not mix, and more often than not, the child is faced with a mountain if he or she confronts a compound sentence. Errors of attraction are common.
After more than two decades, the Education Ministry now recognizes that teachers must have children do lateral thinking. Minister Baksh calls it critical thinking. He then tells the new teachers that they should also teach in a manner that would encourage problem-solving, enhance communication skills and enable the processing of information.
This should have been the norm. But I have a problem. Are the very teachers capable of doing the things of which the Minister talks? They came up in a system that forced them to learn by rote and the very teacher training institution did not do much to change that method.
“Teachers are ill-prepared to address the existing and emerging personal and societal challenges faced by youth.” Those were the words of the Minister. And he is right. The solution rests with a clean start. I would concentrate my trained teachers at the starting levels of the schools. Having done that, the next thing is to ensure that these children are always exposed to good teachers.
Way back in 1969, a group of young teachers, all of them trained, descended on the Bartica Secondary School. By the time they left, children were graduating with excellent pass grades at the GCE O’Levels. A few of them are very much in the society, performing at the highest levels. Dr George Norton, Dr Monica Odwin-Sagala, Lloyd Barnett, Gregory Holder, the Georges, and so many others, are testimony to what it means for good teachers taking ordinary children and piloting them through their school career.
It is not by accident that the old graduates of Queen’s College and the Bishops’ High School were the people who acceded to high office in Guyana. In fact, they were there in just about every office. And when they left these shores they made an impact on the institutions they attended. They were all exposed to good teachers from the moment they entered the schools.
And so we come to the efforts being made to improve the school system. Computers are being installed in all the schools. This means that more children are going to be exposed not only to technology, but also to a world of information.
There is one problem, however. The method of procuring these computers is fraught with questions. Last week, the Education Ministry signed a $223million contract with a group of young people to supply 1,400 computers which would be installed in some seventy schools.
This supplier owned a company that failed to pay its taxes last year and was threatened with being struck off the list of businesses that could operate in Guyana. A few months ago, this very company could not even supply a laptop computer to a potential buyer.
But the government went ahead and awarded a contract. Was due diligence done? Are we unwittingly compromising the very education system by contracting a supplier who may do more harm to the already embattled system?

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