By Anu Dev
It’s always disappointing when things aren’t allowed to reach their full potential. Like how we have all of those rivers in our interior flowing down precipices just looking pretty, when they could be used to generate hydroelectricity, providing our nation with a valuable renewable energy source. We spend our time squabbling about present cost instead of looking at opportunity cost.
But even more disappointing, is when our most valuable resource – our human resource – isn’t allowed to reach its full potential. In Guyana, over the years we’ve produced some of the brightest minds around. Remember our ‘Guyana Scholars’? It’s been so long since they abolished that scholarship, but yet persons like my dad still talk about the Guyana scholars with awe. Persons like Walter Rodney are still revered to this day – and he wasn’t even one of THE Guyana Scholars. And of course, if you’ve ever stepped into QC’s auditorium, you’d see the boards up with the names of all of the Guyana scholars.
Going to QC for the past seven years, suffering through enjoying the experience of our biweekly assemblies, I’ve become well acquainted with those boards and I used to wish that we still had the Guyana Scholarships available, desultorily wondering if my name could be up there with the greats.
We need to bring back the Guyana Scholarship that was awarded to the best GCE A-level student which has now been supplanted by CAPE. And also offer more national scholarships to our students overall. President Ramotar made a good start last year but we need to award more to students who’ve battled through CAPE. Maybe not 412 like Trinidad dished out this year but we need significantly more than we have at present.
Going through the CAPE experience I can say that it was a quantum leap from CSEC. Going into Lower Six we were informed upfront that we’d be expected to cover 80 percent of the work on our own, with our teachers there to cover the remaining 20 percent. Compared to CAPE, we were practically spoon-fed at CSEC. And the level of the work at CAPE compared with CSEC is so much in depth. I never thought I would reach a point in my life when CSEC would seem as simple as Common Entrance, but then I did CAPE and well, I found myself wishing I was still back in 5th form.
But in terms of preparing me for university, CAPE did a much better job than CSEC ever could – I learnt a lot about how to use the resources around me to learn things on my own. So do I regret doing CAPE? Not in the least! In fact I would recommend that all students writing CSEC wishing to proceed on to university or any tertiary institution continue on to write CAPE.
To be continued…