New school year, same old trends

Sep 04, 2012 Editorial

Schools reopened their doors yesterday with some 15,000 more entering the classrooms of primary schools. These were the children who were attending nursery schools across the country. At the same time the staffing situation has undergone no significant improvement, despite the numbers graduating from the Cyril Potter College of Education.
This is not difficult to understand. Many teachers have reached the age of retirement; another large group has opted to migrate and even more have entered the private schools where they have been promised better remuneration. The teaching situation, then, is probably slightly worse than at the end of the last school year, because some of the more experienced teachers have left.
Indeed, some of the teachers coming from the training institution would be entering school with a lot of promise and enthusiasm. It is expected that the heads of schools would latch on to the enthusiasm and ensure that these teachers do not fall into the rut that so many others have. These are the teachers who have to be hounded out of the staff rooms to conduct their classes.
At the other end of the spectrum are those children who will no longer be attending school. Many simply passed through and have entered the world of the adults with precious little in the way of life skills. These are the people who would be knocking on the doors of the various workplaces and business houses.
Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh, in his half-year report, said that the economy grew by 2.8 per cent. This is extremely marginal. When one considers that the growth was recorded in the gold and bauxite industry and even in the rice industries, then one can see that of the many seeking employment in the established places, only a few would be successful.
However, the reality is that for years the government has had a freeze on employment, with the result that the labour force in the public sector has either been stagnant or shrinking.
There are going to be many frustrated job seekers, most of them with the basic requirement sought by the public and private sector employers, but there will be only a handful of jobs. Depending on the employer, they will need qualifications other than the academic requirement, and this too will add to the frustration of the job seekers.
Meanwhile, for those entering the education system, and even for those returning, many things in the school system have remained unchanged. The method of teaching remains, as one educator said, analog in a digital world. A year ago the government began distributing laptops to families as part of a major programme. These laptops are expected to help children research programmes that would stand them well in school.
At the same time, various organizations have been donating computers to the education institutions for the benefit of teachers and pupils. We know that some institutions make very good use of the computers, but we are certain that there are others that remain nothing more than white elephants, because the schools have not been connected to the information superhighway.
The Distance Education programme touted by the Ministry of Education for almost a decade has not recorded much and in the end the government has curtailed spending in this area. The result is that those children entering school at this time can expect nothing more than their grandparents did decades ago. There is still going to be talk-and-chalk method which has long disappeared from progressive schools in other parts of the world.
Guyanese have long been known as copycats. Every style that hits North America reaches Guyana in short order. This is seen in the clothes people wear, in the way they dress, and even in the construction industry and the vehicles they drive. However, we fail to copy those things that would stand us in good stead. We have not yet copied the presence of laptops on every child’s desk.
There are those who may say that this is expensive but if the truth be told, these days laptops are cheaper than some footwear.

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New school year, same old trends

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