Climbing Trees vs. Extra Lessons

Mar 30, 2012 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
In the March 12th edition of Kaieteur News, the Chief Education Officer (CEO) is quoted as saying, “Children should be playing and having fun and enjoying their lives, climbing trees, scooting and falling down, scraping themselves and running around and enjoying their afternoons.” I want to believe that the pressures exerted on the CEO by the teachers of South Georgetown at the meeting caused him to transcend into the absurd.
Mr. Sam continues, “I am troubled by the fact that I hear that parents feel that their children don’t have a chance of success in this system unless they drag them to lessons as early as Grade Two, and that bothers me…”. I will be most happy if the respected CEO can distinguish between the extra-lessons he condemns and the Ministry’s policy of remediation which is almost mandatory at all levels of the education system and which is the main component of the current $86.7 million intervention of the Ministry of Education.
Mr. Sam will retract his uninformed condemnation when he analyzes the two and realizes that there isn’t any significant difference.
The Ministry of Education (MOE) is adamant that remediation must be done. Has any training been done to help teachers understand how remediation should be planned, executed and evaluated? How are students identified for remediation? Is the instruction differentiated? What is significantly different between the normal class teaching and the remediation? Are students performing better having undergone remediation?
These are research-based questions which must be asked if the MOE wants to advocate remediation. Moreover, if these questions cannot be answered then extra-lessons and the MOE’s remediation are one and the same. There is absolutely no difference between the MOE’s idea of remediation and what happens in extra-lessons. I wish to remind the respected CEO that even if students do not go to extra-lessons, they still cannot ‘enjoy their lives’, ‘climbing trees’, ‘scooting and falling down’, ‘scraping themselves’ and ‘running around and enjoying their afternoons’ because they have to attend the Ministry’s mandatory remediation classes.
If extra-lessons and the Ministry’s remediation are one and the same then why is the Ministry of Education so peeved about extra-lessons? It is simple. Extra-lessons allow a teacher to supplement his or her income and to eventually become financially secure. Numerous teachers, including officers in the Ministry of Education, have used extra-lessons, which they now condemn, to become financially independent. This is the Ministry of Education’s quarrel with extra-lessons. The Ministry of Education knows that they can no longer control teachers if they are financially independent.
Mohammed S. Hussain

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