The American Dream vs. the Guyana Dream

May 25, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Guyana this week was graced with the presence of a young lady who is only seventeen years old, and who has gained entry so far into twenty-one universities in the United States, eight of which are considered Ivy League – amongst the best in the United States.
The young lady should be congratulated for her achievements. We are not as yet sure whether she has set some sort of record in terms of the successful applications she made. But it is not the first and will not be the last time that students have gained admission to all eight of the US’s Ivy League.
The Daily Mail newspaper reported last year on eight students who gained admission into all eight Ivy League universities in the United States. The students were Munira Khalif of Minnesota; Stefan Stoykov of Indiana; Victor Agbape of North Carolina; Pooja Chandresheker of Virginia, Harold Ekeh of New York; Alexender Romain of Minnesota; Ronald Nelson of Tennessee and Fernando Rojas of California.
Some of these students gained admission to as many as fourteen universities. One of them had a SAT score of 2270. All of them were the children of immigrants.
There used to be a time when the children of immigrants, no matter how well they did, had very little chance of getting into an Ivy League College. Things have changed. In fact today, being the child of an immigrant and doing exceptionally well at SAT, as well as having varied social pursuits, puts you in good stead in obtaining admission to one of these top universities.
All of the Ivy League universities are now placing emphasis on diversity and giving more opportunities for minorities. If you are a minority and you do very well in high school, then you may stand a chance of gaining admission. It is still, however, a highly competitive system, but it is not closed to students, even from Guyana. Guyanese students have historically gained admission to such universities.
It is believed that this policy of supporting diversity is an experiment that the Ivy League colleges are attempting to deflect criticism of their elitist past. But there is also evidence that having a broad mix of students from all backgrounds does contribute to the improvement in academic performance. It apparently has worked in the United States.
But it has not worked in Guyana. During the era of cooperative socialism, there was a suggestion made that the top schools should be populated by both strong and weak students. There was resistance to this, and the authorities did not pursue it within the top secondary schools. But there was an attempt within some schools to mix the better students with the poorer students in some classrooms, so that the stronger would pull the weaker students up. The experiment was never measured and the verdict was that this was not a plan that many parents were comfortable with.
St Margaret’s Primary School was once considered the choice primary school in Georgetown. Parents went to all kinds of trouble to ensure that their children could gain admission to this school. And the results for many years tended to justify their faith, with the school always doing well in the Secondary Schools’ Entrance Examination.
Well, after Sacred Heart Primary School was destroyed by fire, the Ministry of Education began to place students from Tiger Bay, a poor community, at that school. The rich parents revolted by removing their children out of the school and placing them in other schools.
This affected the performance of the school at the National Grade Six Assessment, with the result that the school is no longer considered a prime choice for primary admissions. The choice primary school today is Success Elementary, a private institution.
The results have been different at the University of Guyana. There, students of poor parents have excelled. So it needs to be examined whether diversity works well at the university level but not necessarily at the primary school level. It also needs to be examined whether the attitude of parents towards diversity in education contributes to better performance.
The American Ivy League system helps to perpetuate the myth of the American Dream: that with hard work anyone can make it. It takes more than just hard work to achieve the American dream. Hard work is necessary, but it also takes a bit of good fortune, and even so, not everyone is assured of achieving the American Dream.
What about the Guyana Dream? What does that take?

1 thoughts on “The American Dream vs. the Guyana Dream”

Pam May 26, 2016 at 4:54 pm

There are other Guyanese youths who have done extremely well too but their parents do not want the publicity.

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