Dear Editor,
It must be 50 years and more that the Common Entrance Exams now called the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) are being written with students all being assigned a number. The numbered system assured fairness across the board and that no one would be singled out for discrimination.
In a country with a contentious racial divide, Government is honour-bound to keep such a system in place and not replace it with one that would require the student’s name. Assurances that during marking the names will not be known by the examiners allay no fears. Already, there are suspicions that the system will be rigged at the administrative level to favour certain students over others.
Had the People’s Progressive Party/Civic Government ever attempted to institute such a system there would have been cries of “education apartheid” and more.
This is an extremely important issue and it is not only parents who should be alarmed about the new naming system that is to be introduced.
Perhaps the Alliance For Change can redeem itself with its 11 per cent electorate and step in here to stop this change. Change was promised but this is not one anyone wants and Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo should understand the fears about what is really afoot here.
Also catching my eye – and still on the subject of education – was a report in Guyana Times about a play “Colour of Race” that will be staged by one of Guyana’s premier schools, Queen’s College.
I am surprised that in a nation so proud of its diversity that the students of a leading school with some of our more intelligent minds would fall prey to the shallowness of a drama about “racial mixing” in the context of “acceptance or change”.
QC seems to be pushing that tired Burnhamist agenda of this kind of “racial mixing” as the “true” Guyanese when the new age accepts the richness of diversity.
These students should be listening to world leaders instead of our parochial politicians and hearing the language being spoken about respect for the peoples of the world.
It is shocking that QC subscribes to such backward ideology and one must hope that the brighter students will not participate in this offensive bit of drama.
Yours truly,
Shanie Jagessar
