Even though it was delayed by two weeks because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the time for writing this year’s CSEC and CAPE has arrived. And it is our hope that all of us will appreciate the stress that most of the new generation, who will be inheriting what we have wrought, are undergoing in what will be the most stressful period of their lives.
If too many have not already been stressed out from the fiasco of last year’s marking of papers, about 17,000 youths will be writing their CSEC and CAPE. CXC does not seem to cater for national holidays in their scheme of things, so will Guyanese students be credited for writing exams on Caricom Day?
But it is not just the stress of writing an exam on a day of celebrations that produces the stress in our children: it is the role that exams have come to play in our country presently. These exams will more or less determine the future of these youths. While the National Grade Six Assessment is also stressful, students know at the back of their minds they have an opportunity to catch up over the next five years. And we see this reflected in the results of CSEC where an increasing pool of top performers are coming from the “non-premier” rural schools.
Because of the importance of the exams, the stress arises primarily from students’ fear of failure which is in turn generated because of the disappointment their parents may feel at their failure. While it may not be deliberate – and in an increasingly rising number of cases, it is – parents make children anxious about failing – as if life is going to be an unending string of successes. Failure is part and parcel of any normal life and it is important that children are taught how to deal with it early on in their lives. Failure to learn this lesson can result in depression and, in some cases, even suicide.
The parents, sometimes at great cost, send their children to lessons, which consume so much of their free time that ought to have been spent on leisure activities. All work and no play make Jack and Jill dull boys and girls: children whose intellectual and creative abilities were not developed.
They are raised in a hothouse atmosphere between school, lessons and home, being afraid of making mistakes, being afraid to explore and being afraid to test the unknown. Most lessons and schools simply emphasise rote learning that must be regurgitated in the examination rooms. After considering all their parents “have done for them”, the children are filled with guilt if they fail.
Parents have always been concerned with the education of their children, but in today’s world of cutthroat competition, shallow relationships, narrow viewpoints and nuclear families, this natural concern becomes a high level of anxiety if the child does not perform to their expectation.
Another reason for the failure is that most of our children cannot relate to what is being taught to them in schools. We can first start with the language and vocabulary used in these “total institutions”. Just as with the old plantations, or in the asylums from where the phrase was adopted, schools impose an order which the child is not expected to understand but one to which he or she must simply conform.
Take the language of “standard English” that is used from the moment the child enters the school system at age three. It is a totally alien language for most and it is highly scandalous for children to feel inferior just because their intonation might be different from the teachers’.
Most children taking the CSEC and CAPE exams are right now fearful of failure not because of some innate lack of intelligence but because they became bored and confused by the system that was supposed to “educate” them. We have to do better if we really want our country to be independent.
