Falling through the cracks

Aug 04, 2012 Editorial

The results of the Caribbean Secondary Examinations Council examinations should be out anytime now. More than 18,000 Guyanese students would have written these examinations and no more than twenty per cent of them would do well. This is good because there should be replacements for the older people who are leaving the system. The sad reality is that many of these would depart for foreign lands leaving mediocrity in their wake.
But there is an even more serious issue and this has to do with those others who fail to make the grade. Gone are the days when they would have been sent to a trade school or to some institution where they would have developed life skills. Indeed, these institutions still exist, but many parents do not know about them or seem not to care.
The result is that we would have a host of young people either walking the streets looking for jobs as store assistants or as any low level worker. It is not now unusual to see office assistants well into their fifties, because they got into the system but were incapable of gaining upward mobility.
With the goldfields beckoning, there will be those young men who would head in that direction. There would be others who would seek to become minibus drivers and conductors; girls would head to the institutions that offer help to early school leavers, but there are not too many of these. A few would set up trays and vend on the streets. These would be the young entrepreneurs.
A long time back the system provided for streaming. Those who were academically inclined would be placed into a technical stream. The system worked. There was the Guyana National Service which accommodated a large number of young people. One person who benefited from that system was former Assistant Commissioner of Police Paul Slowe.
We have been talking a lot about developing the ‘slow’ learners, but we have not done much in recent times, with dire consequences for the society. Of interest is the pattern in rural Guyana where the extended family is very much alive. Parents can often be heard telling children that if they fail to take in their ‘school work’ they would have to learn trade.
It goes without saying that the drug trade has impacted the system. The lure of quick money is seeing many young people gravitating to the drug dealers.
The solution rests in the government taking a real interest in those who fall through the cracks. Indeed, there is some effort to rescue them. The Education Ministry has a programme for remedial learning but even here the parents and the children do not rush to take advantage of this offer.
This is shocking and suggests that many parents are not into education. There is the suggestion that the economic conditions have parents looking toward the next meal rather than focusing on the development of their children, who are in effect, an extension of the parents themselves.
There is the work study programme that enables some institutions to grab those school leavers who may have an inclination toward the place that offers the work study and the Education Ministry ensures that the programme works.
What is needed is an extension of this programme. Children should be sent to the various construction locations where we are certain, contractors would be glad to have extra hands for less than he would pay his regular workers. There are also those locations that fabricate furniture and other household equipment. Students should be assigned to these facilities.
For the record, Guyana is not the only country faced with what seems to be growing levels of unskilled and untrained young people; it is not the only country where the young people are slipping through the cracks. The United States with its immense resources has the same problem.
However, there are systems in the United States that would eventually capture the laggards. Further, there are many people. Guyana does not have those luxuries.

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