Should we be really celebrating?

Jun 09, 2013 Features / Columnists, My Column

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Many a household is in a celebratory mood. The Education Ministry announced the results of the National Grade Six Assessment and sent some children and parents into screaming fits. Of course this has been a tradition for as long as there has been a national examination through which pupils could gain entry into secondary schools.
Way back when, the best secondary schools were reserved for the children of the elite. It mattered not whether these children were as dumb as door nails; they had the advantage of colour and social standing. The national leaders however recognized that there were talented children, who, but for the accident of birth, might have been able to make significant contributions to humankind.
Of course, there were limits to the aspiration of the child who was allowed to capitalize on the education opportunity on offer. For example, there was a most brilliant Guyanese named E. Mortimer Duke. He was so brilliant that he was a Guyana Scholar at 16. He studied by the flambeau his mother used at her roadside stall. He was unbeatable.
When he went to England he wanted to study engineering. It turned out that he was too black to be an engineer. He became a lawyer, but when he returned to Guyana he could do no better than teach at his alma mater, Queen’s College.
There were many others like that over the years.  The vast majority flowed with the tide and became colonials. They studied to work, not in Guyana, but in the mother country. Later, many became Americans and Canadians. However, there was always the power of Queen’s College; every parent wanted his or her child to go there and so get a head start in life.
And as the years went by, so did the competition for the limited space at Queen’s College. Today, there seems no end to how much money parents are prepared to put out to get their children into the leading schools. I did some basic calculations and for mere lessons, I found that parents were forking out about $16 million per month for their children.
Then there are the more affluent who send their children to private schools. This is another substantial outlay. I then concluded that if I had to do the computation I might find that to merely progress from primary to secondary school is a multi-million-dollar business.
I had already been told that the Ministry of Education accounts for about fourteen per cent of the national budget. Now if the government is spending billions of dollars to see that young Guyanese are educated and then parents spend millions more, one can assume that there is no limit to how much Guyanese treasure education. But the skeptic that I am, knows that any expenditure is not for the advancement of Guyana.
I remember the days when the public schools dominated the results. Stella Maris, St Margaret’s, Tucville Primary, Leonora Primary and the schools in Berbice and Essequibo were considered the top performers.
This time around, the private schools are dominating and there must be a reason. It could be that the better teachers are found in the private schools, but these very teachers are recruited from the public schools.  When one looks at the teaching in the private school, one sees that every classroom appears to be professionally managed.
In the public schools, the level of managerial skills is lacking, and this may be the reason for the decline in results. I have now found that the academic quality of the teacher trainee is not what it should be. It is as if people are now turning to teaching when they cannot secure a job in the other sectors. The Guyana Police Force is no different.
So I watch the celebration of those who have done well and I think about those who have not done well. I think about the disappointment of those who expected to do well, but who will now say that their poverty was a limiting factor. Of course this is not true. A few years ago there was a girl from the Soesdyke/Linden Highway who did well, but who was not certain that she could have afforded to go to school.
I don’t know how she is making out, but I do know that she is there scrapping with the most affluent of them. This is the message one would like to see the society offer those who do not have money to go chasing after the best teachers.
I know that there will be parents who will not give up trying to see that their children get a proper start in secondary school. At the same time there are teachers who are shopping around for money. They are offering their skills to private schools that have done well. They want to bask in the glory of the school. They do not want to take a public school and bring it up to par.
I remember the days when teachers in public schools felt that they were better than any teacher elsewhere.  I was one of those and with my colleagues we challenged those in the more established schools.
I now want us to think about those who are likely to fall by the wayside. These are going to be with us for all their lives and they are the ones who will determine whether we sleep at nights. We need to look at them too, even as we celebrate.

 

 

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