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Rural Schools

Apr 29, 2013 Editorial

 

In our news report from yesterday’s edition, “Schools in rural areas being overlooked – GTU”, General Secretary of the union, Coretta McDonald, emphasised that rural and hinterland schools are being squeezed of supplies and ancillary services such as counselling as opposed to the “fancy” Georgetown schools. She laid the blame squarely at the feet of the Regional Education Officers, (REO’s) who, in the estimation of the GTU’s President Colin Bynoe, are too “tied to their desk”.
While we would not break a lance over the responsibility of REO’s in the delivery of supplies to the schools in their regions, we believe the neglect of schools outside of Georgetown is the consequence of deeper structural issues that must be addressed if we are ever to have a more equitable distribution of education in our country. This skewed delivery of education has led to the overall retardation of growth in our country since the three-quarters of our country that live outside of Georgetown remain in an entrenched state of underdevelopment.
This is not to say that the schools in Georgetown do not have problems of their own. But in developing the point made by the GTU officials, we are viewing the situation in a comparative context. The Government and its Ministry of Education (MoE) are not oblivious to the untenable situation. A decade ago, the then Minister of Education announced a plan for the equalisation of the performance of the schools across the country by providing them with a proportionate share of the education budget and the resources funded by that budget.
As is usual with the plans that emanate in quick succession from that Ministry, the equalisation plan seems to have been quietly abandoned. The most visible symptom of the disparity in education delivery remains the siting of all the “premier” secondary schools in Georgetown. Berbice High School, which once had aspirations of being the “Queens College of Berbice”, has long been denuded of such Icarus-like pretensions by the Ministry of Education.
President’s College, which had been established by former President Burnham as a rival to his erstwhile alma mater, Queens College, has also been cut down to size: meaning that it is now like all the other floundering rural schools. The establishment of the “premier Georgetown schools” began in the 19th century as the colonial bureaucrats wanted schools that would be worthy of their children – and simultaneously groom the scions of their local collaborators to produce a loyal upper stratum.
Queens and Bishops were followed by the Catholic boys and girls schools like St. Stanislaus and St Roses, established by the rising Portuguese business class. The Georgetown schools were therefore always pampered by the colonial civil service. This continues to this day since the Georgetown schools fall directly under the protective care of the MoE, while the rural schools have to make do with the Regional Education Departments which have never been given the personnel or resources to compete with the central Ministry.
And this is where any change designed to install a more egalitarian basis in our school system has to begin. The Regions must be given resources, both human and material, proportional to their school populations. We could do worse than begin with trained teachers. While there has been some improvement in the percentage of trained teachers in rural schools, we are still light years away from the situation that exists in the Georgetown schools. In the latter, graduate teachers are now common because of the proximity of UG to the city. Once the graduate teachers have tasted the facilities of the Georgetown schools, how do we get them back into the country?
If the MoE is interested in giving equal opportunities for every Guyanese child to have an equal education, it should refurbish off its old plan and add a time-line to it. The great strides made in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to deliver education in rural and other far-flung regions as exemplified by the new Learning Channel, suggests that we have moved beyond sharing school supplies to bring equality in education.

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