By Anu Dev
Last week I wrote about the importance of writing the CAPE exams because not enough students write CAPE in Guyana. And it’s really not that surprising because CAPE isn’t as well publicised as CSEC is here. I know I’d never heard of CAPE until fifth form, I was still walking around talking about A-levels.
And in general, we don’t make such a big deal about CAPE results. We bring out the marching band, the confetti and the red carpet for our CSEC top students, but our CAPE top students are given a much more lukewarm hurrah.
Like this year, it felt like our CAPE results were announced as a by-product, or side issue to the CSEC results. But as someone who has done both, I can say that by the time you reach university, the things that you did at CSEC really don’t matter as much as what you battled through at CAPE.
We need to encourage more kids to stay in school and do CAPE and one of the ways we can motivate students is to offer them the chance of national scholarships at the CAPE level.
The Guyana Scholar used to be awarded after A-levels, because they knew that sixth form exams were the ones that really mattered.
And our national scholarships should be focused on the STEM (Science, Technology Engineering and Math) areas. Those are the areas that we need to have skilled professionals in to develop our country.
If there are more national scholarship options available at the CAPE level, maybe we won’t have students writing 70 subjects at CSEC in the hope of topping the Caribbean to get that scholarship.
I’ve written before about the importance of our streaming system and how important it is to stick to your stream instead of mixing and matching to make up 70 subjects in the hope of getting that Caribbean scholarship. We should be offering scholarships in specific fields of study so that kids would have some sort of motivation to be the best in their chosen area of study.
And of course, more national scholarships could hold the answer to our brain drain problem. In Trinidad, The Bahamas, Jamaica and Barbados, all of their scholarship students are expected to return to their country to serve for a particular number of years.
And I don’t think that that’s unfair. It makes sense; your country is paying for your education, of course you have to give back something to your people.
It’s a win-win for both our country and our students. We could send our top students abroad to get the highest quality education and then have them return home to develop our country.
And hopefully we can get to a point where the development is so significant that our scholars will stay not just because they’re obligated to, but because they genuinely want to stay for the reason that they could have great opportunities right at home.
Let’s bring back the Guyana Scholar and let’s offer more national scholarships to our students. We have so much potential in our young minds; let’s give them the opportunity to flourish.