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Manickchand optimistic about local production of textbooks

Jul 05, 2013 News

Although the existing state of affairs may see the Ministry of Education procuring books directly from foreign publishers over the next two years, Minister of Education Priya Manickchand is optimistic that three years from now, locally produced textbooks will be a reality. She anticipates that even while books are being procured, local writers will be tasked with producing textbooks.
“We have the ability, we have the wherewithal, we have the knowledge and, the technical expertise…We may need some more training on how to write, but we will have to redirect the way we spend to make sure we can initially produce the books then replicate them over the next few years,” the Minister said.
She revealed that discussions are ongoing and the Ministry is currently “mapping out our resources and who we might want to do that. If you know how I operate, I want it done yesterday”. She has however accepted the fact that the process is likely to take a few more years before it fully materialises.
Her ambitious disclosure was made yesterday when she hosted a press conference at the National Centre for Educational Resource Development.
But locally produced textbooks are nothing new, since at the moment textbooks that were produced locally some time ago, are recommended for reading in preparation for the Caribbean Examinations Council’s examinations. Also the core textbooks, that is, Mathematics, English, Science and Social Studies, for the primary level, were crafted by local writers.
The primary level textbooks, according to Manickchand, were done through the Basic Education Access, Management and Support (BEAMS) project.
“We don’t have those resources anymore and I can candidly say that we don’t have the money that we had under BEAMS, but it was our Guyanese people who wrote those,” the Minister told media operatives yesterday.
She insisted yesterday too that “we believe the time is fair now where we should make a bigger and better effort to write our own books.”
Moreover, she disclosed that the Ministry will be aggressively embarking on such a venture in order to furnish more children with the resources they need to do better at examinations. This move, according to the Minister, will better prepare students to take over the leadership of Guyana in various regards in the future.
Minister Manickchand said that currently the procurement of textbooks is an expensive enterprise, although the Ministry has been in receipt of “fair” discounts from publishers. Not so long ago the Education Ministry and by extension, Government, were chided both locally and internationally for reproducing copyrighted textbooks. This had prompted the decision to forge business relations with foreign publishers.
And according to Manickchand yesterday, “we are pleased with the discount that we have been offered and we note that those were not previously offered to us. This was one of the reasons we were forced to procure the books the way we were procuring them” .
But even with this, she disclosed that the Ministry is only able to buy a very limited number of textbooks.
“For example we are going to be buying for the secondary sector this year only five textbooks that are published by overseas publishers…This is simply because they amount to $50 million in the quantities we are purchasing.”

 

 

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