AFC “education crisis” comment unjustifiable

By Ron Cheong

There they go again – the Alliance For Change (AFC) trashing Guyana. Even in the wake of their duplicity regarding the country’s development projects being exposed in the debates, they have tripped right along to promulgating another one of their contrived “crises”.

Their objective of the current adventure to maligning Guyanese education – asserting that Guyana’s education system is in crisis. But this time their smear campaign has been interrupted and discredited quite abruptly.
And that has been done by the actions of no less a figure than United Nations Secretary General Ban Kimoon.
The day after staging a press conference claiming that the Guyana government has no real interest in providing anything, but a basic education for Guyanese because “an uneducated citizen is easier to control”, we learnt that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has tapped President Ramotar for a Select Steering Committee of 15 distinguished members, which includes Irina Bokova, the director general of UNESCO, the heads of other UN agencies, the World Bank and Sir Gordon Brown, the secretary general’s special envoy for Global Education and former UK prime minister.
Speaking at an Education Month rally at Queen’s College under the theme “Transforming the Nation, Through Inclusive Education”, President Ramotar shared credit for his invitation to sit on the committee with education workers, pointing to the tremendous work being done by all stakeholders who have over the years served with loyalty in the country’s education system.
The Education First Steering Committee that President Ramotar has been asked to sit on focuses globally on getting every child into school, improving the quality of education and using education to build global citizenship.
That fact that the secretary general had an almost unlimited slate to choose from, and that he chose Guyana speaks volumes. Here is a country that has a limited budget, but whose commitment from the president down, programmes, and people’s appreciation for education allows it to outstrip expectations given the resources at hand.
But out of some nihilistic self-loathing agenda, the AFC proclaims that government does not want Guyanese to get beyond a basic education because an uneducated citizen is easier to control.
One wonders who the AFC is speaking to or about when they made this pronouncement, and if they have any respect for the intellect of Guyanese. I think even the media with opposition sympathies had trouble with this contrivance.
The facts are that on top of all the work being done directly through the school system, this is a government that’s undertaken to provide laptop computers to families under the One Laptop Per Family Programme in order to accelerate the country’s ICT skills and help every Guyanese to access the world of information out there.
The work the country is doing is recognised by the World Economic Forum, whose Global Competitiveness Report 2012 to 2013 ranks Guyana 42nd in the world for quality of higher education and training and 50th in the world for quality primary education. And the secretary general of the United Nations has invited input from Guyana in pursuit of global Millennium Development Goals in education for the young.
Guyana’s own 2011 progress report on its Millennium Development Goals produced under the sponsorship of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), shows that universal primary education has been virtually achieved with the net primary school enrolment being consistently above 95 per cent since 2000, and the country is well on track to achieve universal secondary education by 2015.
Two government priorities have been the improvement of access to primary education for students in the hinterland, and the improvement of inclusiveness for students with learning disabilities. Former Education Minister Shaik Baksh has done much work in this regard.
These objectives have been supported by the building of a large number of new schools, of all levels throughout the regions of the country.
Further supporting initiatives provided by government programmes include helping with text books and other learning aids, as well as school feeding and uniform programmes.
Together, these programmes have helped to boost attendance and students’ performance, particularly in hinterland communities where hot meals are provided in approximately 45 per cent of schools in Regions One, Seven and Nine, with some schools in Region Nine being served peanut butter and cassava bread snacks where hot meals are not available.
Another gratifying outcome of these and other initiatives has been that schools throughout the length and breadth of Guyana are now producing top performers, unlike the past when this was mainly obtained by city schools.
These achievements have allowed Minister Manickchand to note in her remarks at the Education Month rally, that education in Guyana has achieved gender parity and geographical parity in schools. So that when Guyana now speaks of inclusive education the focus is on special needs students.
On the staff side, work is also ongoing to improve teachers’ attendance alongside gradual improvements in the ratio of trained teachers which has gone from 51.5 per cent in 1994 to 67 per cent in 2009/ 10, although hinterland regions still lag behind the national averages.
And there have been consistent attempts and ongoing negotiations in recent years to improve the salary and conditions of service for teachers. The progress report notes that while Guyana is simply not in a position to compete with international salary packages, other innovative ways are being explored to retain teachers such as duty-free concessions for principals and housing for teachers in the hinterland. The closing observation is that the AFC has managed to completely overlook the context of the stellar achievements of Guyanese students over the years, and attempted to transmute this year’s disappointing Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) results in Mathematics and English into a unique Guyanese failure.
These results are troubling, notwithstanding the exceptional accomplishments of some individual schools and students. It is not something that is being taken lightly. But as noted by Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) Registrar Dr Didacus Jules, the sharp drop in performance was Caribbean wide. This is perplexing and has caused tempers to flare in education circles in several of the countries. The issue will no doubt come under scrutiny. But that is another discussion that will unfold.
The big picture is that Guyanese students have consistently taken top spots in the exams and they will continue to do so. And Guyanese teachers continue to be highly respected throughout the region.
Guyana’s school system is not perfect, but it is doing a heck of a job in the circumstances and with what is available.
As Education Minister Priya Manickchand said in response to the AFC, “I would be the first to tell you that if you want something negative to talk about, visit any school, there will always be some zinc sheet that needs repairing, a stairway that’s falling down, a place that needs painting, some student that didn’t turn up, a teacher who’s got her head on the desk when she should be teaching. There is always going to be something that you will find because we are dealing with 300,000 students, 10,000 teachers, 1000 schools; with those kinds of numbers, you will always find something to be critical of. But if you truly love Guyana, what you will do is join us in our consultations, join us when we go all over this country and we are talking about education, come there and tell us how we can do better.”