Guyanese educators and teachers suffer from ‘mumpsimus’

Nov 14, 2016 Letters

Dear Editor;
I refer to your Sunday September 18 edition of the Kaieteur News and your editorial with the caption: “Looking Back at Colonial Education”. I make specific reference to: “However, the education system bequeathed to Guyana by the British during the colonial era was designed to keep the nation in ignorance.” What does ‘bequeath’ mean? To leave to a person or other beneficiary by a will? In this context, is the education system in Guyana legally constrained by a ‘will’ to function in a certain way? I don’t think so. And ‘designed’ suggests an ‘intentional act’. Has that motive been established? Where is the evidence?
The editorial goes on: “There was evidence that the intent of the British was to educate a small section of the population so that they can function at a minimum level, while keeping the majority illiterate.” From a purely economic point of view, that does not make sense.  The British are eminently pragmatic. They wanted a skilled labour force because a skilled labour force increases productivity. Plain and simple!   And here the editorial commits the Fundamental Attribution Error: it assumes that others almost always derive intrinsic satisfaction from what they do.
The term ‘fundamental’ in the expression stems from the fact that the problem is pervasive. Attribution, of course refers to the fact that people are assigning the reason or imputing the motive behind the action. Finally, the word error, suggests that when people automatically assume that others did what they did because of ‘evil’ motives, they’re often wrong.
When attributing the reasons behind human action, people habitually assume that others gain gratification from everything they do. Instead of having no other alternatives, or otherwise being influenced by ability, social or economic conditions, the British did what they did, according to the editorial, because they wanted to ‘keep the majority illiterate’. That is far from the truth.
The education systems in the Caribbean and elsewhere within the colonial system were designed to produce efficient civil servants for the Factories and the Civil Service of the Mother Country. The British didn’t ‘bequeath’ the education system to the colonies. The colonies were educated through the Factory Model System.  What the British did they was that used the Factory Model System because it was the most efficient and effective system to train people. It was not driven by any moral imperative. It was driven by pure economics. It was not designed with the intent to ‘educate a few.’ Rather it was designed to supply as many ‘trained civil servants’ as was needed by the colonial masters. Pure and Simple?
Your editorial refers to the Mighty Sparrow’s calypso “Dan is the man in the van” which satirizes the poems used by the then colonial education system. Those ‘mother-goose’ types of poems were not written specifically for Caribbean people but for the British children themselves.
And given the stage of development of printing and education at that time, it was only natural and logical that the same poems were used in the colonies.
What is revealing about that situation is that Guyana and other territories have not been able to ‘create’ their own poems. I agree with the editorial that “… not much has changed from the colonial education system.” And this definitely is not the fault of the colonisers.
It is the fault of the colonized, the present day ‘educators’ and teachers  who have been in the system for decades and  who suffer from ‘mumpsimus’ – the persistent and stubborn adherence to a false belief.
Here are a few ‘false beliefs’ that hold us back. The teacher is still the ‘fountain of knowledge,’ the ‘authority- figure in the classroom. That was true in the colonial days when the teacher was the only person who had access to the text books. Today, that is no longer true.  Today, any student can gain instant access to the world’s largest library “The Internet”.
Today’s teacher is the ‘facilitator’ of learning, not the ‘repository of knowledge’. In fact, as one student asked, why do I need a teacher when I have Google, YouTube and online courses?  Until our education system makes that shift, little progress will be made.
Another ‘false belief’ is, what some call “The Grandmother Theory of Education’: the child’s brain is a ‘tabla rasa’, a ‘blank slate’. The teacher has to ‘write’ things on it. And since it is a ‘blank slate’ it is empty and has a fixed capacity. You can only put so much in it and no more. Unless many educators and teachers change that view, we would continue to see the reliance on outdated teaching methodologies such as boring, repetitive drills, with the consequential poor performances in the science subjects. Yet another ‘false belief’ is that the ‘teaching methods’ used by prominent teachers of the past are still effective. Here again, there is need for a more ‘scientific approach.’
Vanity metrics- I read recently that the government has approved some 43M to stem the decline in the performance at the National Grade School assessment in Mathematics, English, Technology and Science.  In an earlier edition of your newspaper I also read about the huge amounts of money being disbursed in the Education Sector.
Many Guyanese see that as ‘vanity metrics’: merely boosting an image of the ‘Big Spender’ – throwing money at a system that is patently not working with the hope that that will solve the problem.
The Ministry of Education should move away from ‘vanity metrics’ such as the amount of millions spent and the number of ‘photo-ops’ and sittings of the Commission of Inquiry into Education and pivot its focus towards Key Important Metrics, such as the number of initiatives in the Guyana Education Sector Plan 2014-2018 that have been implemented, the number of schools that are ‘fully functional facilities’ and which now have increasing levels of autonomy, the increasing amount of ‘time-on-task’ in the classroom, and of course the number of passes at Grade School and Secondary School levels.
Anthony Willis

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One thought on “Guyanese educators and teachers suffer from ‘mumpsimus’”

carl veecock November 14, 2016 at 12:56 am

An excellent letter
I wonder if the ‘guest editorial writer’ would dare to respond at least to acknowledge
as I am stating, that the letter was indeed a treasure!

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