Fertilising STEM

Over the past three decades, globalisation has been fuelled by the spectacular advances in information and communications technology. The factories in China that began to churn out consumer products for western entrepreneurs in the 1980’ s would not have been possible without, for instance, the fax machine that enabled computer engineers in, say, New York City, to communicate detailed instructions in graphic form almost instantaneously.
But what is often forgotten is that over in China, the individuals working in the factories had to be capable of comprehending the schematics and other types of instructions. The factories could not have become sustainable without the workers being educated and trained to follow those instructions. The education revolution preceded the production revolution. The Indian success in computer software also followed that route which had been blazed by Korea and the other Eastern Tigers since the sixties.
The education that was demanded concentrated in what became known as the STEM subjects: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. In the classic feedback loop postulated by our own Caribbean’s Nobel Winner of Economics, Sir Arthur Lewis, peasants in the Chinese countryside were then recruited and educated to run the ever increasing number of ever increasingly sophisticated factories. And the virtuous cycle, still in motion, was initiated.
When we consider the reasons that the Caribbean has lagged miserably behind such island nations as Singapore and Hong Kong (ex- British colonies that had lower levels of ‘education’ than us at independence), their emphasis on the STEM subjects after independence, as opposed to our neglect, has to be noted. We continued to depend on our ‘sun and surf’ while our education system fed into that by introducing the Carnival mentality into our schools.
A perfect example can be seen in the present when a group of concerned Caribbean bodies – the financial services corporation Sagicor, the Caribbean Examination Council and the non- profit Caribbean Science Foundation – have initiated the “Sagicor Visionaries Challenge” to stimulate the interest of Caribbean youths in the STEM subjects. As their website announces: “ The competition is aimed at secondary/ high school students who are encouraged to identify a challenge facing their respective school, assigned school or school of choice, and using Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), develop effective, innovative and sustainable solutions to the challenge identified.” With a top prize of US$ 5000 and a trip to Cape Canaveral in Florida, the competition was launched since last November.
But for all intents and purposes, most Guyanese schoolchildren only learnt of the competition at the end of January – two weeks before the deadline for submission of the proposals on February 16 – when a member of the Sagicor team wrote about it in the private media. The Ministry of Education of Guyana, in the meantime, had pulled out all the stops in organising its Mashramani competitions in the schools.
We are not proposing that the Mash preparations in Guyana’s schools be halted. We expect that the Ministry of Education has collected hard evidence that the children’s participation in Mash through song and dance has contributed to nation building, as advertised. But could not the ministry have expanded its Mash activities to incorporate STEM projects in schools, which could also be displayed on Republic Day as a symbol of nation building? Would not floats, displaying models of the STEM projects, have inspired the onlookers lining the Mash route as much as the gyrations of the schoolchildren who were drilled so conscientiously during the past months? But more insidiously, has the ministry considered the message it is sending to the youths in our schools as to what is more important in theirs and the country’s future?
We can complain all we want about the 67 per cent failure rate regionally or 70 per cent in Guyana in Mathematics at the CSEC, but unless those responsible for our educational system make it important, we continue to watch the rest of the world pass us by.