May the new Minister of Education be an enlightened policymaker

Dear Editor,

One of my little friends on the West Bank Demerara got the results of the latest Grade 6 (+4+2) Assessment. He scored 363. This is about two thirds of the marks, so he must know something. I know that he knows the alphabet and can write all the letters, but can only spell a few simple words and recognise only a few common words. He can count and write the numerals, but arithmetic is essentially a mystery to him; he never learnt the multiplication table.

I considered the outlook with his father. It was gloomy. The boy is likely to lose interest in formal education in high school as the work becomes more abstract the more he progresses, or rather, the more he is promoted. I have seen too many like him drop out of school and become swallowed up by the allurements of criminal behaviour in order to make a living. Let’s hope family ties prevent this. It did not in the case of the eldest daughter.

They had migrated from his family farm in the hinterland to look for betterment in Georgetown at the urging of his wife. She hardly understands English, but claims the reason for migration is to have the children get an education. She did not consider that there would be no one in the home capable of discussing or checking on the children’s schoolwork, since her husband, who knows to speak English, cannot read and write it and would have to work hard for their upkeep.

In that region he was somebody and made a decent living in their own dwelling. Here, he has to labour for others when he can find work to bring a pittance to his family living in dwellings that do not belong to them. Didn’t somebody point out that our forest dwellers want the city, whose dwellers want America, whose dwellers want the world and eventually come here backpacking to our forest?

I provided services last week for a CAPE Physics student. She had to study the characteristics of a resistor that has a load limit of 100 watt.

The power supply is rated at 300 watt, so if it goes over 100 watt the resistor can be damaged or destroyed.

There are two digital meters reading voltage and current in plain numerals, and all that is needed to figure out the wattage is to multiply the voltage and the current from those meters as the values change. She can’t do the check without a calculator, the operation of which consumes critical time in entering the figures while the resistor might be overheating.

She has 16 subjects at CSEC with lots of grade ones, including distinctions in Maths and English, and if I am supposed to accept that kind of performance I refuse to do so without grumbling to the education authorities to get properly educated people to refashion some consistent and consequential standard of education that will deliver us from appearances of achievement and rampant mediocrity.

This electrical measurement exercise used to be done in the blink of an eye in the 1970s by students with 8 ‘O’ Levels and mere passes in English and Maths reading analogue meters (shaky needles on dials). By the eighties they had to get about 10 subjects, by the nineties 12. Now …?

Education ought to be controlled by enlightened policymakers. Journeyman bureaucrats are there to execute the instructions of the enlightened policymakers and to report accurately on the efficacy of the implementation using measures approved by the said enlightened policymakers. Here are some suggestions.

1. Recognise the limitations of the present system in terms of the number of competent teachers available to teach what subjects.
2. Plan to change the system over time. This will need agreement from the opposition so that the plan can continue even if there is a change in government.
3. Start by valuing the true competence of the teachers; not because someone has filled in, eg, for a Maths teacher is he counted as a Maths teacher; he must be required to demonstrate the competence.
4. Until there is a sufficient cadre of young teachers imbued with the good traditions of the school, the most senior teachers should teach some Form 1 subjects, taking fewer classes if necessary with form 5. Less experienced teachers can be distributed among the middle forms.
5. Decide on the simplest Grade 6 syllabus. I recommend English, Arithmetic (with sufficient time for Mental Arithmetic) and Verbal Reasoning. Drop Social Studies and Science and expressly replace with simple life skills like hygiene, road safety practice, singing, exercises in good manners and how to courteously treat people of various ages, societies, culture, gender, religion, ideas etc, who are right among us. These life skills are perhaps best examined by interview or demonstration.
6. There must be more consequence to the results. Surely the aim of the earlier Grade 2 and Grade 4 assessments should be to speedily inform administrators at the level of the Education Officers and hence the Ministry of Education (MoE) of the levels of achievement of the students so that opportunities for remediation become available.
7. Games must be supervised by teachers and used as vehicles of life skills practice, points being awarded for good sportsmanship and deducted for poor life skills (after being taught them).
8. With the limitations in teachers and facilities, those who still cannot read and write should not expect to be placed in high school. Reading strengthens the ‘muscles’ of the mind by developing what is now termed its ‘symbolic processing’ in computer lingo.
9. And in high school, not everyone should presently be expected to go past the Grade 9 assessment to get into Form 4. Demeaning appellations of their achievement should subside when the earlier inculcated life skills begin to take effect and their elders in society employ them meaningfully.
10. The excellent advice from Mr Mohammed Hussain’s seminal letter (‘Extra lessons cannot be stopped,’ SN, June 12) for the MoE to “restructure the system of supervision so as to ensure that all aspects of the curriculum are completed in the designated time in school” should be implemented in the 4th and 5th Forms.
11. Eight 40-minute periods per day, 5 days per week should allow no more than 10 subjects in English, Maths, History, Geography, Foreign Language and Arts, Science & Technology, and Business, in two or three streams, depending on the size and/or focus of the school. The fewer subjects might have allowed my CAPE student to be more useful in her computational proficiency.
12. Whoever wants to do more subjects should be free to do so in private schools and extra lessons, but they should not burden the present system and taxpayers with their ambitions. There should be no problem for the public schools to be used as examination centres for more subjects, but not their premises for extra lessons.
13. The Sci & Tech streams should primarily be suited for the region. More options can arise as development takes place.

In a farming area, the subject should be Agriculture. In a mining area the subject should be Mining (and its safe practice). In a forested area the subject should be Forestry (and its sustainable practice). This might have saved my little friend’s mother from looking to Georgetown for her children’s education.

1. Mining and Forestry are not yet high school subjects, but surely it is not beyond the wit of the GGMC, Miners Associations, GFC, and above all the University of Guyana to craft suitable content and then work with educators to convert to curricula. I remember spending nine hours fashioning a course for a UG Post-Graduate Diploma in Sugar Technology near the turn of the century when there was talk of instituting a “Cheddi Jagan chair of Sugar Technology”. Nothing came of it because the administrators and politicians started by looking overseas for expertise and funding. It was not a concept to them that they should negotiate with me, a Guyanese, who was specially trained to run such a programme.

May the new Minister of Education be an enlightened policymaker, able to approve designs that use what we presently have to get what we want before looking for salvation from overseas funding, and able to inspire those at the top of the educational system at the University of Guyana to mind those in their early phases that they may become net contributors and not drains on the Guyana society.

Yours faithfully,

Alfred Bhulai