The delayed CSEC and CAPE results have precipitated the usual accolades for the top performers and with good reason. While some may cavil about “elitism”, no society can flourish unless those with natural abilities in various fields of human endeavor are facilitated to develop their potential. One positive development in this year’s announcement is that while the top performers in both CSEC and CAPE were from the traditional “elite” Queens College, the top ten performers in both categories included students from other schools – especially rural ones such as Anna Regina Secondary in Essequibo and SVN at Cornelia Ida on the West Coast of Demerara.
The performance of the latter school, as it has done in the last decade, has proven that schools that are not fortunate enough to hive off the top NGSA performers can still compete with those that do. The anecdotal evidence suggests that effectiveness in the delivery of the curriculum by trained and dedicated teachers combined with a disciplined student body can go a long way in equalizing test performances. It was interesting that the Bishops High School, which is just below Queens in harvesting NGSA a high performer, was noticeable by its absence in the latest top ten.
But as Guyana at long last has been given the opportunity to build a nest egg from our oil revenues to be the catalyst for spurring our development in a directed manner in the next three decades, we will have to re-examine the premises of our educational system. Fifty-five years after independence Queens and Bishops are still redolent of the British Grammar School philosophy on which they were founded back in the mid-19th century.
While the “classicist” focus on Latin etc. might have been jettisoned, we still have not clarified what is proper “Education” – with a capital “E” – that our state should be funding. For instance, while “Agriculture Science” is a subject at CSEC that is available at even the “elite schools”, there is no commensurate gravitation of these elite graduates into agriculture, even though there is much lip service given to this endeavor being the long-term savior of our economic viability as a nation. The old British disdain for manual labour still lingers, especially is it is related to “the fields”. Maybe it is the reason we have not produced a Jimmy Carter who was a peanut farmer before he became President of the United States.
While we cannot coerce students into any particular field of study, the government can provide incentives to steer them in directions that would further the developmental needs of our country. Some of the high flyers did say they were interested in engineering, for instance, and perchance they should be earmarked by the government to encourage them to move on to specific engineering areas demanded by our present needs. From the continuing challenges faced by GPL we can be sure that more power engineers are needed.
But as our country develops, we have to be also careful to nip in the bud the detour that academia in the western countries we emulate took in the humanities. There, inspired by post-modernist French theorists, for the last five decades graduates secularly replicated the medieval scholastics who debated the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin. The advice of the iconoclastic 19th Century philosopher Nietzsche in his essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” might be useful.
Nietzsche begins by quoting a sentence by Goethe: “I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity,” then indicates that history should help us to live: “We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it…We need it for the sake of life and action… We want to serve history only to the extent that history serves life.”
Education in general must serve life or else it is self-indulgence.
