Today, 14,551 students from Grade Six in primary schools across the land will be taking the second part of their two-day “National Grade Six Assessment” papers. For most of these 10-12-year-olds, the results of these exams will, to a great extent, determine the trajectory of the rest of their lives. And we use the word “exam” rather than “Assessment”, which replaced it in 2003 when the “Common Entrance Exam” was discontinued.
The change was supposed to address some concerns raised over the preceding decades about the “make or break” event that came so early in the lives of Guyana’s children. The top five per cent, or approximately 600 from every cohort, would qualify to attend the top five or six “senior” secondary schools – all in Georgetown – and the remainder would be farmed out to the appropriately rated secondary schools closest to where they resided. The “bottom” three quarter understood from their placements not much was expected from them, academically.
In the past, they were farmed out to officially segregate in schools dubbed as “community high schools” but without doing anything to upgrade their status, the name reverted to the generic, unencumbered “secondary school”. And herein lies the rub. More than a decade ago, the Education Ministry, in changing the name of the primary school final exam to “assessment” promised that the grades obtained in the four subjects would be used to “assess” the strengths and weaknesses of the individual students and form the basis of individualised tutoring when they entered 7th Grade in the secondary schools. In fact, the notion of “assessments” formed the basis of introducing two others in the second and fourth grades, which made a nominal contribution to the final grades after the NGSA.
The Ministry also then promised that the secondary schools in each region would be upgraded to match the “senior” secondary schools in Georgetown. That this was possible was well known since the Berbice High School and a few other rural secondary schools had in the past replicated the performance of the Georgetown “senior” schools. Since the introduction of the scheme of assessments and promise of equality in the delivery of secondary education, however, there has been absolutely no follow up.
And we return to the premise on which this editorial is based: it is time the Education Ministry relooks at the thinking behind the unfulfilled changes in the education of our youths prior to their entry into tertiary education. There has certainly been much noise created about a “renaissance” at UG. But this renaissance will not arrive full blown from the head of Zeus or any other god who has been appointed to head the University. It can only be built after fixing what has been broken for a long time at the primary and secondary schools that feed the University of Guyana and other tertiary institutions.
The coming oil boom will create a new economy, whether that economy will be a victim of “Dutch Disease” or not. To insure the latter possibility, however, the entire focus of our educational system, from nursery to university and beyond must be revamped to cater for these changes and demands. Our educational system is still dominated by the British focus on “academics”, which, as we pointed out earlier, by those criteria doom most of our youths to kicking bricks on the streets, lives of not so quiet desperation or alternatively, lives of crime.
It is perhaps fortuitous that the new incumbent Education Minister is a relative newcomer to the delivery of education in Guyana and she personally has been recently exposed to new pedagogical tools and techniques. Her predecessor was the epitome of the “old school”, having attended the most elite ‘premier school” and universities to complete “classical degrees”.
It could be the case of the child who pointed out that the Emperor has no clothes, and that perchance the new clothes could be consciously made more appropriate to our climate.
