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Free education is a farce

May 08, 2019 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

 

There is one question for which a study will never be commissioned by the government. That question is: Why is it that the students of the five senior secondary schools outperform students in the rest of the educational system?
The PPPC or APNU+AFC will never commission such a study, since it will burst the bubble on the egalitarian model of education, which justifies the policy of free education. The answer to that question will expose the bogus model of education which has been practised in the name of free education and which has shortchanged local students for more than fifty years.
Free education was introduced as part of a socialist system. The objective of free education was to have a more egalitarian system of education in the hope that it would raise the educational performance across the country and break the culture of elitism, in which predominantly students from select schools did far better than those from other schools.
Free education has been in existence for more than 40 years. Yet, in direct contradiction to this policy, the top students at examinations continue overwhelmingly to originate from the top secondary schools, most of which are based in Georgetown
If free education were serving an egalitarian purpose, then one would have expected that results would have been more even, and that there would have been no longer the need to designate schools as senior secondary or junior secondary. There would have been no competition also for places at the top schools, because the performance gap between schools would have been narrowed or erased.
Free education has not evened out educational performance. Performance is still dominated by the top five or six secondary schools. However, it is not that these schools enjoy any superior advantage in terms of their teaching methods. Their superiority is in the students.
The old elitist system allows for the best of the primary schools systems to be assigned to these schools. As such, the best students end up at these schools and it is the students and the environment, which is mainly responsible for the superior performance, not free education.
The policy of free education was well-intended, but those who were responsible for its formulation were too stepped in elitist values. As such, they tried to impose egalitarianism on an elitist model of education. And the result has been an education system that has been an absolute disaster.
Each year, we read about the excellent performances of students, mainly at the top schools. What we do not read about are the large numbers who perform poorly at examinations and therefore leave school functionally illiterate and innumerate.
One would have assumed that with the large numbers of failures within the secondary school system that efforts would have been made for revamping the education system. But this is not happening, because the middle class, which traditionally has exerted influence on both the PPPC and APNU, is not interested in changing a system which works for their children.
The middle class does not want an even education standard across all schools. It wants an elitist system in which the crème de la crème of primary school children can dominate the places awarded for the senior secondary schools.
This system perpetuates a system of educational apartheid. It is not racial apartheid; it is a system of class apartheid, because if a random sample is done of the top students at the primary-leaving level, it will be found that only a minority are from the poorer classes.
And that is how the poor people of Guyana have been shortchanged by the so-called system of free education. Free education, has for the majority of the poor people, amounted to nothing other than a second class education.
Why has free education failed? It has failed because it has retained the old elitist model of competition for school placements, which allows the better students to get the better schools and the poorer students to have to settle for a second-class education.

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