Time for small quick fixes is past… Education sector needs a complete overhaul--Dr David Hinds

Hinds'Sight, Guyana Chronicle

I WRITE this column after a day of interaction with educators. On Sunday last, I attended the Graduation Exercise at the Company Road Primary School in Buxton where I was asked to give the Charge to the students.Later in the evening I was a guest, along with school teachers Deon Abrams and Delicia Van Cooten, on the TV programme, African Drums, where we discussed the state of education in the African Guyanese community. So, education is on my mind.

In its 1992 election manifesto, the WPA said that were it to win the election of that year, it would declare a state of emergency in education. That was 23 years ago. The party recognised then that something was very wrong with education and that only radical overhaul would correct it. Today, the WPA is part of the Government. One of its leaders, Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, is the Minister of Education. I hope this column reminds him of his party’s pledge two decades ago.

In fairness to Dr Roopnaraine, he has been taking aim at some of the root causes of the education problem. He is one of the two busiest Cabinet members – the other is Infrastructure Minister, David Patterson. It is no accident that these two ministers are so busy. In a broken Guyana, education (the mental infrastructure) and the physical infrastructure are most broken. I have been one of Dr Roopnaraine’s close comrade for 38 years and can vouch for his commitment to education as a central pillar of development.

There is no doubt that education in Guyana is in shambles. And I say education, rather than the education system, for education is more than just the formal system. Education is a process and a communal resource. It involves the formal system, the community, the family, the students and other institutions such as the church and trade unions.

It is all-encompassing, with linkages to the political economy, governance, foreign policy and defense. If education is broken it is a signal that the country is broken and vice versa. Our education has been going downhill for a long time. The collapse of the nationalist experiment of the first two decades of independence and the consequent rise of the neo-liberal Structural Adjustment imposition meant that national priorities changed. Whereas the nationalist agenda placed the education of the nation at the top of the national agenda, Structural Adjustment prioritised the market. So from the late 1980s, Government has paid less attention to the education of the collective nation as a medium of development. It turned education over to the logic of the market. Yes, monies have been pumped into the education sector, but there was no longer an overall vision. So teachers remained grossly underpaid, teacher-training lagged behind the rest of the world and students’ motivation to embrace education as a gateway to progress virtually disappeared. As is the case with unregulated marketisation, only the strong survives; the weak is left to fend for itself. Soon the culture of hustling took over the education process. Private Schools and Private Lessons multiplied without due regard to the quality of instruction. Public education, with very few exceptions, became known as a medium of mediocrity. In the end, educational success hinged on economic wealth – the minority who can afford private tutoring and high class private schooling succeeded while the majority languished at the bottom of the pile. Since the products of the minority elite education migrated or remain to fill the high class professions such as the law and medicine, other professions such as school-teaching generally recruited from the products of the public school system. Thus reproducing to institutional weaknesses of the system. For example, you see your teacher pay more attention to After School Lessons rather than the Classroom, so when you become a teacher you do the same. In the end we have a blame-game — teachers blame the system while the system blames teachers who blame parents who then blame the teachers who blame the children. So here we are in 2015. We can justifiably blame the previous PPP government for the state of education. But that would only score you political points. We, as a nation, have to take responsibility for what went wrong and for correction that’s badly needed. The time for small quick fixes is past. Nothing short of a complete overhaul should be accepted. The Minister has launched a Commission of Inquiry. Good! But I remind the Minister that his Commission would produce precious little if it does not go into the communities and hear from those most affected. Your party’s State of Emergency is still needed Mr Minister. (Dr. David Hinds, a political activist and commentator, is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Caribbean and African Diaspora Studies at Arizona State University. More of his writings and commentaries can be found on his YouTube Channel Hinds’Sight: Dr. David Hinds’ Guyana-Caribbean Politics and on his website www.guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com. Send comments to DR.DHinds@gmail.com)