An education? For what?
-and Criminal Ignorance
By A.A. Fenty
These observations were prompted by the editorial in this week’s Sunday Stabroek (SS July 13, 08).
Especially the bit about “The get-rich-quick culture which hardly sees education as necessary…”
I shall return to that under-stated profundity but I want to wax anecdotal first, because if ever I win a substantial National Lottery game, I swear that I would volunteer many hours to teaching both deprived rural and inner city Ghetto Youths every week.
Months before my mother I did not know too closely died in 1998, I actually spent three/four months teaching teenagers from Campbellville, Sophia, Lodge who could be described variously as “drop-outs”, difficult, under-privileged and challenged. I had left the formal classroom as a teacher of another “challenging” bunch at St Sidwell’s School, Lodge, and way back in 1971. Oh, but both my year at St Sidwell’s and at that Adult Education Association (AEA) class, twenty seven years after, housed in a centre where the Chronicle Atlantic Steel Orchestra once practiced, recalled E.R. Braithwaite’s “To Sir, With Love.”
Briefly, it is the latter AEA “Special Class” I need to mention. They were between thirteen and eighteen years of age. Just two of the maximum thirty-six were of “non-African descent”.
One girl admitted to being frequently abused by a step-father; two other girls (in upper classes) had already given birth; one fellow in my class would, occasionally, skulk to smoke spiffs two yards away – the “good boys” in the class would usually “raid” him back to school; three or four of the girls were obviously responding to their raging hormones, sometimes making concentration a challenging effort. Inwardly, I identified ten mischief-makers, aided by real “bad eggs” out-of-school, who only attended because equally tough parents made them register every day.
Among these ten, one boy cut a girl (accidentally) with a broken bottle, another probably encouraged his mate from outside to write wicked words on the black-board during recess. And so on. But more than twenty were willing to learn!
That was my silent joy – and daily motivation. It was therefore my mission to make them understand why they should want to know to spell (certain basic words), to add, to compute, work out simple but necessary transactions from making a shop list to ensuring accurate measurements; keeping up to date with specific current social affairs; enjoying more than one type of music and sport. The basics for life!
Here in front of me used to be fertile ground for our future bandits and prostitutes, conmen and disease-riddled, abused young ladies – if they were abandoned by home, school, church, society. But there too were potential businessmen, top sportsmen, public servants, tradesmen and usefully self-employed young Guyanese women – if enough of us cared, to consider that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste”.
Well I used all of my better, appropriate teaching skills from the sixties. I “modernized” my techniques and approaches. I did an “E.R Braithwaite” on them often. I knew their music and told them to modify their dress. I harped on self-respect. We challenged – and won – the “brighter” ones upstairs in Spelling Bees. I took some to my radio and TV productions. Admittedly, I used the occasional low blow: “Dirk, even if you want to push coke, you have to know to calculate and change money so you won’t be robbed!”
“Yvonne, what a lovely wrist-watch you have today, But you can’t spell “wrist”?”
By and large, I think I was succeeding with the overwhelming majority when, I left abruptly during the week my absentee mother died. The satisfaction, the joy was that most of their parents – and them – saw a need and the benefit for an Education, even at that most basic level.
What “Education?”
Which brings me to the Sunday Stabroek editorial and related issues. Columnist Ian McDonald once discussed what a proper “education” should be. And should do.
Could one of the young graduate teachers out of the CPCE discuss with me what a “well-rounded education” is? Or should be? I’ve been trying to keep up with the Education Ministry’s basic literacy programmes. I see they are going to review how children’s primary school years are spent. I once heard, years ago, of the University of Guyana hoping/planning to respond to the human-resource, necessary and employable skills needs of the real Guyana world. I trust these matters really produce. But I can’t be impressed or persuaded by what I see around me these days. And hear every waking hour.
I now concur that generally, nationally, there is a crisis in the lower levels of our education system. Mind you, schooling is going on! Passes are in the media and our students still do great abroad. But I’m talking about the scores of thousands, still sub-and semi-literate, falling through the education cracks.
As one who never attended a High School or any University let me share my view of what a good basic Guyanese education should be – and do.
For me, by age sixteen, my Guyanese mid-teen should have mastered Reading, writing and ‘Rickmetic (see my poor spelling?), some other form of math, should appreciate a little poetry and literature and four/five types of music; should turn to a skill or trade depending on aptitude; should know lots about Guyana even if not having seen it; should want to become interested, if not already so, in advanced information technologies; should be settled, with expert guidance, about what he or she wants to “become” within the next decade (before they are 26) and should be able to sit and discuss and “reason out” problems and conflicts.
Those are my basic requirements of a reasonable practical education in Guyana. Do we deliver? Does the society absorbs? Discuss.
Gross, criminal ignorance
And now I conclude my sermon for today. The Sunday Stabroek editorial included this:
“There are of course all kinds of things working against the ministry in its effort to raise educational standards, not all them directly related to education per se. They include the ubiquity of television and video games; the general indiscipline in the society; truancy; the get-rich-quick culture which hardly sees education as necessary; the decline in the work ethic; the significant number of single mothers who have to work long hours to feed their children and who are consequently not able to supervise them; a lack of parental support for the educational process, and so on. But if one single factor were to be isolated as the key contributor to the decline it would have to be the chronic shortage of qualified and/or experienced teachers.”
I can go along with all that. However, I contend also that the life-long needed skills of parenting are not there. The under-thirty parent cannot teach the child, of eight to twelve, to be patient and to learn to reason; to respect elders or how to behave in courts or hospitals, when they grow up. Laws and regulations “pass for grass”.
So gross, uncouth, mindless individuals drive recklessly even though speeding killed five recently. Human life has lost its sanctity. Even twelve year-olds are unmoved by bodies on the street. Criminal ignorance says “speed, rob, con.” Education’s not noble anymore if two robberies, one corrupt deal or conning a blind woman out of her inheritance pays much, much more, very quickly.
What can we do to prevent the gross, the criminal and the ignorant from prevailing?
Until….
Do we have any Consumer Association with more than 100 members to protest against any utility’s oppression?
Three gunmen barged into a girlfriend’s humble home. The two year old screamed for hours, the nine year old stayed traumatized and dumb for half-an-hour. The handicapped grandmother was pistol-whipped and a young male beaten unconscious. But we are upset when the police pre-emptively stop and search all and sundry in Albouystown!
There are times to give up “right” temporarily for the greater long-term good.
‘Til next week!
Comments? allanafenty@ yahoo.com