Urgent need to train Guyanese for major roles in engineering

Dear Editor,
With the Government looking at billions of dollars in new revenue in the future, it has indicated that it’s essential to put education front and centre. Investments in schools in rural areas are necessary to ensure a robust elementary, primary, and secondary mathematics and sciences education for all our children. Our Government will ensure that educational quality in rural areas equals that of Georgetown. We must create opportunities for talented and high achieving students across the country.
One example of resource use likely to pay huge societal dividends in the future would be the building of infrastructure beyond Common Entrance Exams to identify exceptionally gifted math and science students; to place these highly-gifted students into special accelerated schools or courses, and to develop a system of educational tracking of these highly talented math and science students to ensure their entry into top-flight universities with strong and creative mathematics and science departments. Our human resources are indeed our most valuable resources.
The pipeline from which Guyana’s geoscientists and petroleum engineers will emerge begins with the mathematical sciences. If Guyana is to succeed, we must start to this foundation now. For Guyanese to participate in and effectively and democratically manage this new resource, Guyanese must be familiar with mathematical sciences. However, our Government and Minister of Education’s challenge now is to design and implement a programme of bold new educational initiatives to broaden participation in the mathematical sciences across our nation.
There is an urgent need to train Guyanese for roles such as production engineers, drilling engineers, reservoir engineers, completion engineers, and environmental engineers to support the oil and gas industry. The recent return of Guyanese, who had been sent overseas for training for technical roles in the oil and gas industry, points to the need to increase nationals’ skills. The oil and gas industry represents job opportunities at home for Guyanese, who have traditionally emigrated. A prerequisite for this training is a foundation in the mathematical sciences.
This opportunity is Guyana’s chance to build a prosperous, technically competent, and stable society but the question we must ask ourselves is how do we accomplish this goal? We know that our PPP/C government recognised that education is a national priority, however, we need to emulate successful national examples such as Finland, Sweden and Singapore, which provide effective instruction in the mathematical sciences to learners with varying preparation levels.
We must also exploit opportunities for connecting mathematics achievement and excellence to Guyana’s cultural resources. After working in Finland for many years on various projects in the STX shipyard, I was fortunate to see firsthand the Finish educate system and how it works, science education is firmly integrated into early education, children from different backgrounds are given the same opportunity to equally adopt a scientific way of thinking which in turn benefits their society.
As Guyanese, we all remember the joy felt as a child when you realised something for the first time. Perhaps you learned a new trick or understood how something works, it is precisely the insights that can have a great effect on how you act and make decisions today. The COVID-19 pandemic has given a perfect opportunity to learn and find out meaningful ways about our children, they will grow up to think of themselves as active agents, learners and critical thinkers, it is important now that our children practice research skills and receive science – math education before they enter school, allowing them to be more motivated, which enables them to gain better learning results later in school.
At the moment, the University of Helsinki Finland offers science education for children in science clubs and various courses online, this education focuses on practicing the skills of exploration, including how to make observations about the phenomenon under scrutiny with activities always using stories, play and drama to tie examined phenomenon into the children’s everyday experiences. Although science education is often applied to natural sciences, it actually encompasses a discipline, at its core, science education develops scientific and critical thinking and scientific literacy which are prerequisites for becoming a full member of society making justified choices and participate in discussions about science.
Our current early education curriculum already includes topics that can make use of science education, such as making observations about one’s surrounding, naming phenomena and classifying things. Our teachers and educators need to be encouraged to adopt science and maths education by offering them training and materials, conducting plenty of research about what constitutes meaningful early education. Our Government’s objective is to see science education courses increasingly integrated into university education in the future, especially in early education and teachers’ education.

Sincerely,
David Adams