The CSEC grind

Once again the CSEC results are out in Guyana and we are all agog at the performance of the “high flyers”. It certainly demands special powers of concentration, not to mention real grit and “stick-to-it-ive-ness”, to be able to write 15 subjects, much more to obtain grade ones in all of them. With the top two students revealing that they wrote Agriculture as a double award, they actually ratcheted up 16 grade ones.

An incredible performance and we tip our hat to them.

While all the details of the results are not yet available for an in-depth analysis, we can yet offer some preliminary comments. During the past year, Guyana’s Education Minister Shaik Baksh has been reported as favouring a restriction of the number of subjects that students may take at a single sitting to eight. The results over the last few years have indicated that the minister has been wise in holding off solidifying this proposal into a fixed rule. Guyana has not only been able to consistently capture bragging rights over the Caribbean Top Student Award during that time, but has also been placed in a position where one of its schools, Queen’s College, can arguably be considered the best secondary school in the Caribbean using the criterion of number of top students securing the most passes annually.

With the top spots occupied by girls, we are certain that the perennial debate (over the last decade at least) about where boys are heading, will receive a fillip. While we do not dispute that our local circumstances have to be investigated, we ought not to lose sight of the fact that this trend is a global one. It would appear that the decades-long struggle for the equality of the sexes has borne fruit and that in the educational field at least, the pendulum rectifying the historic imbalance favouring males might have swung a bit too far.

But as our CSEC physics graduates would concur, this is necessary to achieve a new and more equitable final distribution. Then again, the seeming anomaly might simply be a case of girls being able to devote more time to studies because the pressures on them to have more extracurricular activities are not as great as on boys during the secondary school phase. Do boys catch up during later educational and work endeavours? Then there is the vexed question of “extra lessons”. One top performer, Ms Anuradha Dev – who incidentally is a weekly columnist for this newspaper – has revealed that she did not have to resort to such lessons for any of her 15/16 subjects. In fact, the young lady waxed very eloquently on the proposition that if the curriculum is covered during the assigned periods in school, there is absolutely no need for institutionalised “lessons”. The minister and Education Ministry have to focus on teachers’ attendance and their lesson delivery schedule.

The initiative of the new private secondary school, Saraswati Vidya Niketan (SVN) on this matter is instructive – particularly in light of the remarkable individual and collective results they have achieved during their short existence. SVN simply requires of staff extra teaching hours during the school year and remedial classes during the holidays for identified slower learners in the new fourth forms. Our public teachers should be asked for no less.

Overall, with the exception of mathematics, it appears that our country’s performance at the CSEC level is quite credible. This is a great compliment to the government that has consistently devoted record spending on this sector and to the Education Ministry for tirelessly introducing innovations to deliver its curricula more effectively. As a matter of fact, in the areas of mathematics and the physical sciences, there are at least three programs being introduced to further raise the success rate. The preliminary CSEC results signal that our once destroyed educational system is firmly on the mend.