The old Common Entrance is history and, I hope, a bad memory. What a blessing! The Common Entrance exam inflicted more mental agony, more mind-numbing and mechanistic counter-creative learning by rote, more crushing and narrowing of the spirit, more sheer waste of precious human potential and killed stone dead more carefree childhood days than we can ever begin to compute and condemn. So its end was a blessing indeed.
I remember childhood as a carefree time. Most afternoons, even in term time, I played cricket, football or tennis or was out skylarking with my friends. Weekends we played games or went butterfly catching and swimming up the Caura River in Trinidad or sea bathing “down the Islands.” I was brought up to love reading, so reading of my choice filled many quiet, happy hours. I must have worked conscientiously enough at school because I did well in the end of term exams but I do not have the faintest 
recollection of school-work being the slightest burden or exams being a looming threat until I was about fourteen or fifteen and began to prepare for what was then called the School Certificate. But even then I never took extra lessons in my life. I am sure my parents would have considered such a thing an inconceivable imposition on a child, especially a pre-teen child.
Thousands upon thousands of Guyanese children from the age of 8 were put on the dreadful treadmill which is what preparation for the Common Entrance exam most certainly was. Unnecessary information was stuffed into them at much too early an age – and lessons outside of school became a compulsory feature of Guyanese childhood (for those whose parents could afford them). An immense pressure of expectations built up connected to that hideous make-or-break exam.
Again and again the words written by the great Russian Alexander Herzen about childhood should have come back to haunt and accuse us:
“You are confused by categories that are not fitted to catch the flow of life. What is this goal for which you are seeking? Is it a programme? An order? Who conceived it? To whom was the order given? Is it something inevitable? Or not? If it is, are we simply puppets?…You think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If you merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of all life is death.”
Think of these words and curse the Common Entrance as it was so absurdly devised. Curse the damage it did to the young lives of our children, how it deprived them of so much carefree enjoyment which was their right at that stage of their lives, how it stifled their imagination and creativity beneath a turgid mass of bookwork, homework and extra lessons.
There is another consideration. In my early school days I remember a boy called Ralph Romain. He was relaxed and companionable and was addicted to boys’ adventure stories. He also hated schoolwork and was a legendary dunce. For years he bumped along at the bottom of the classes, getting further and further behind his more conscientious peers. But the system never allowed him to drop out. At the age of sixteen he suddenly decided that schoolwork made sense: two years later he won an Island Scholarship and was on his way to becoming a scholar of the greatest distinction. I mention him only as an example – there were scores of other “late-starters,” as there always are and always will be in every country in every age.
The Common Entrance examination was a curse and an abomination. It deprived our children of so much of what should be a carefree, joyous, unpressured time in the lives they only live once. It stifled their creativity and imagination at just the time when these should be flowering. It forgot entirely that countless children are late-starters. It gave an advantage to privileged children over poor children: because of this deadly exam a child of average ability, depending purely on birth-luck, would do better than a brilliant but poor child.
The Common Entrance was ridiculously over-competitive and dangerously high-pressured for ten and eleven year olds. Making such a decisive grading of children at that early age was an absurd procedure if only because the assessment of intelligence and other such qualities at that age was bound to be very imprecise. There was no evidence that top marks, especially at such an early age, would be a passport to success, effectiveness, happiness or real creativity. The idea that closed book, written exams for eleven-year olds are a test of, or preparation for, real life was and is completely laughable.
But how much did the new system taking the Common Entrance’s place change things? I regret I have not paid close enough attention to how the Grade Assessments work and, in particular, whether they have relieved the terrible do-or-die pressure on very young children and at least pushed into their more senior years the dreaded curse of extra lessons.
From what I read and hear I very much fear that, for one reason or another, the oppressive burden of extra lessons weighs on our schoolchildren as heavily as ever – but surely, surely, the end of Common Entrance has meant that they no longer afflict the very young and stunt their blossoming lives.
