Education sector lacking effective ICT plan – Minister Roopnaraine

Jul 01, 2015 News

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–  STEM, Liberal Arts and Civics for close attention
“The use of information technology is easily one area that can be said we have utterly failed in, in terms of holistic, innovative policy,” said Minister of Education, Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine, as he shared his thoughts on the public education

system.
The Minister, who was at the time addressing the National Assembly last week, qualified his utterance by disclosing that between 2010 and 2014, hundreds of millions of dollars were pumped into various ICT projects in the education system to no worthy end.
This was even after taking into consideration the billions plugged into the Fibre Optic Cable project and the One Laptop per Family initiative, the Minister pointed out.
“Yet, for all that expenditure, we have yet to come up with one single, effective ICT plan either in isolation (or) as a component of a workable ICT or Education Strategy,” the Minister told the House.
Moreover, the task now facing the Education Ministry, he revealed, is to establish precisely where it is in terms of the level of ICT incorporation into education delivery with respect to infrastructure and curriculum.
Simultaneous to this undertaking, the Minister noted that “we will examine best practices from developing countries, like several in the region, who are further along in integrating ICT into the classroom.  When that is done, we can design a long-term policy that sees partnerships with the private sector, the donor community and NGOs, to craft the sort of learning environment that can equip our young people for full participation in the digital age.”
ICT, according to the Minister, has been listed among “other fundamental areas” which are going to need meaningful transformation. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), Liberal Arts and Civics have also been identified for attention.
Speaking of STEM, the Minister noted that “when it comes to the curriculum itself, the President (David Granger) has repeatedly stressed the need for us to focus on STEM…” He went on to emphasize that no country in the present era can sustainably develop and advance without making STEM the focal point of its education system.
“For us to modernize agriculture, we need STEM; for us to combat climate change, we need STEM; for us to take greater control of our extractive industries, we need STEM,” the Education Minister asserted.
In his presentation, he referenced disclosures of CGX co-Chair, Dr. Suresh Narine, that Guyana is not equipped to handle the human resource needs of what seems to be an inevitable oil industry, something, he noted, is reflective of the failure in STEM education.
“Our task therefore, in crafting a strategy, will be to start mapping our skills by examining existing industries as well as potential ones – hydropower, large-scale mechanized agriculture, even computer programming services.”
“We can then use that map to craft a sound STEM component of our overall education strategy, including a revisiting and streamlining of our existing TVET policy,” detailed Dr. Roopnaraine.
But even as attempts are made to acknowledge and recognize the centrality and importance of STEM subjects, he warned that “we dare not be blind to the intrinsic humanizing value of the liberal arts, an area central to my own formation. The mistake we cannot make is to see the liberal arts as somehow in contradistinction to STEM in the delivery of education – they are in fact complementary to our core mission.”
As he stressed the motto of the Ministry of Education – “Eliminating Illiteracy, Modernizing Education, Strengthening Tolerance” – the Minister pointed out that the role of literature in achieving the first goal is inestimable. He therefore announced his readiness to argue that poetry has as effective a role to play in that regard as phonics.  On the second goal, he noted that as has been argued elsewhere, the liberal arts are especially needed in contextualizing modernity, and “I would argue that it is especially so for developing countries like Guyana – we need to have students who are not only able to design a computer programme, but to be able to craft that programme to assist in very specific challenges facing our society.”
In keeping with the third responsibility, as outlined in the motto, the Minister pointed out that the liberal arts – the humanities – are the principal tools necessary for “crafting an environment of tolerance in this divided society, and to prepare us for integration into an increasingly interconnected global space.”
According to him, an enhanced liberal arts education is an investment into Guyana’s economic future as well, in as direct a manner as STEM.  The creative industries, he observed, constitute the most consistent area of economic growth in the Americas and “we are behind in adequately preparing ourselves to take advantage of that growth.”
Turning his attention to Civics, the Minister highlighted that the grand architecture that is needed to restructure and retool the local society will of course not depend solely upon standard academic education, but also the long neglected component of a truly rounded intellectual development, namely civics.
“Our task in this area is to come up with a curriculum that rises above mere social studies and communicates the critical nature of citizenship, and its benefits and its responsibilities,” he asserted.

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