The Education Minister just announced we’ll be getting our NGSA results next Friday. And the parents of 14,000+ primary school students will be holding their breaths, since those results will pretty much decide the futures of their little darlings – who’d been swotting away since they were in Grade 2! Imagine that!! Now, one of the signs that we’re still a Third World backwater is the national frenzy we go into over the NGSA results.
Can you imagine that, sixty-four years after independence, citizens can still go ga-ga over the 100 or so 11–12-year-olds who’ll enter five or six high schools in Georgetown?? It really brings home how profound was the PNC’s destruction of our educational system between 1964 and 1992. Considering we started from being on par with any other colony in the British Empire – including Singapore. Because, you see, dear reader, an educational system isn’t just about the physical state of the school buildings and the teaching staff: it’s as much about the expectations of those who enter it.
When Burnham was finished with Guyana – having completely devastated the 80% of the economy it controlled – the thirst for learning and knowledge honed over more than a hundred years after slavery and indentureship had been obliterated. Why go to school when the only way you could get a decent job was by having a PNC party card?? After another decade, it was “why go to school when there were no jobs outside of cutting cane or selling sweeties at the street corner??”
Anyhow, in what’s known as a “systemic” problem, the urge to excel remains dampened and emaciated for most kids at the bottom of the ladder. Which means the vast majority of the kids, since the oil wealth will take some time to trickle down. And this is even after the PPP heroically built back the infrastructure and trained thousands of teachers since 1992. And Burnham’s picture – which scared the bejusus out of the kids – was taken off their exercise books!
The results are gonna be incrementally better than the previous year, but nothing to really shout home about when almost half of our Grade 6 students wouldn’t be getting 50% of the Maths or English questions right. In this new world oil has brought, we’ve gotta be numerate AND literate if all the good jobs aren’t to be snatched by foreigners.
But your Eyewitness wants to remind the Minister of Education of a promise she’d made at her first crack at her job back in the day: to stop the mad rush for the top 100 spaces.
That all high schools were to be brought up to the level of the “elite” GT schools!!
…for sugar
Your Eyewitness is happy that the GuySuCo management is testing Rose Hall Factory so as to start “grinding” in the coming crop. But he’s more than a mite skeptical about the targets being met. And it’s not just about getting back those abandoned fields into shape – and that’ll be an Augean task demanding several Hercules! – there’s the matter of the other factories.
They’re really not in much better condition than Rose Hall. And once again, we return to the cause of it all: the PNC! From 1975 – when the industry made a humungous windfall from record high world prices – they instituted a levy on sugar exports that wiped out any profits that could be shared with the workers – and just as importantly – used to rehabilitate the factories.
If the sugar revival plan is to have any chance of success, there will have to be the necessary capital injection into the factories. And the fields. Meaning more subsidies for a while.
Let no one have any illusions about this.
…in Berbice
So, have the enrolments at UG Tain Campus picked up again?? When you shut down two factories and fire more than 4000 workers, food on the table takes priority over school fees.
The Government should provide scholarships to those needy students.
