…for ‘swotting’
Your Eyewitness must confess that, every year, when the exam results are announced, his jaw drops to the floor!! How the heck do these kids do this?? Last year there was a 25-subject pass at CSEC, and this year a 16-point pass at CAPE? Wow!! He knows there are steroids that can make your muscles to just balloon you out like the Hulk, but what do they use to inflate their brains? Back in the day, your Eyewitness has to confess, he was an indifferent student.
But when he reads about the amount of time these “high flyers” devote to ‘swotting’ to get those double-digit passes, he must now confess he feels a wave of concern for them. They will never know what it is to have a normal, balanced adolescence – their most crucial stage of life. This is when boys and girls should have been exploring who they are – solidifying their identities; what do they actually like, and most of all, cultivating the art of developing relationships. Is all of that not also “education”?
For one, how about following through with those crushes past the stage of having one’s heart stop beating when bumping into that special someone?? How about learning to move past blushes and a mumbled, “Sorry”?? Not to “boast and brigah”, but your Eyewitness did all right with significant others in secondary schools; all right – and that has served him better than all the mathematics he was forced to endure during that time. He has, for instance, never had to use even one of the several solutions for Quadratic Equations, while the easy patter developed in secondary school has gotten him out of a lot of tight spots!!
Now, don’t get your Eyewitness wrong, it’s not that he is saying one has to be a slacker in school – far from it. But one doesn’t have to be a Buddhist or Aristotelean to accept there has to be a balance in life…a middle way. Your Eyewitness’s mind boggles that a mother would quit her teaching job just to focus on preparing her kid for exams? Can you imagine the kind of pressure this places on the kid to perform? Kids already face the general societal pressure to do well at exams, do they really need more at home?
Politics has been called the continuation of war by other means, and your Eyewitness is beginning to suspect, from the comments on the blogs, that education has also been conscripted into this war! So, like the child soldiers of the Congo or the Central African Republic, we now have those from the high schools of Guyana?
It’s a shad, shad situation!! Let’s return childhood to children!!
…for securing power
One of the motivations for entering politics, the world over, is to be able to distribute the largesse of the state – which includes control of the entire economy – to supporters of the party placed to control that state, as its “government”. The PNC had its first chance between 1964 and 1992, but ensured that in its one-sided distribution, not only that the economy collapsed, but the very fabric of our society did.
Well, the PNC’s presently holding its Biennial Congress, where it’ll elect an executive to ensure Guyana repeats the experience. What else can you say when the present leader of the PNC – supposedly an apolitical Army General – can boast he was “PNC since 1965”, the year he entered the army?!! Or say with a straight face at the opening of the Congress, “The PNCR has done more and gone far further than any other party in Guyana’s history to create ‘an inclusionary democracy’.
When he doesn’t even give his coalition partners the time of the day!!
…for stoking racial divisions
Basil Williams, fighting to be re-elected PNC Chairman, announced, “The PPP starved us and discriminated against us, marginalised us. It is therefore up to the PNC to save and protect the nation.”
The PNC “us” is the “nation”??
