Even allowing for the fact that the Com-mission of Inquiry (COI) into the state of education in Guyana required a good deal of investigatory leg work (and a good deal of contemplation and analysis, as well) that would have taken the Commissioners into the various remote corners of the country, it took too long (a year or thereabouts) before we finally arrived at the juncture of a preliminary report on the findings of the undertaking. Whatever alternative reasons might be proffered for the time that it took, one cannot help but make the point that assignments of this nature undertaken by the state are too often attended by generous measures of dithering and dilatoriness. More disconcerting is the concern that such corrective recommendations as are agreed upon arising out of the final report, might, when they do come, probably take a proverbial year and a day to be properly implemented; and that is despite the fact that the remedies couldn’t come soon enough to a system that cries out for salvaging.
To state that our education system has been falling apart over several years is to state the obvious. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that no government, over several decades, can be properly credited with implementing comprehensive initiatives that have earnestly sought to remedy any of the major elements of the crisis in the education system. Indeed, in raising the question as to whether the Ministry of Education ever earnestly really seeks to measure the extent to which the solutions that it has sought to apply ever really work, the preliminary report makes the point, less than subtly, that attempts at remedial attention have been applied more or less on a ‘hit or miss’ basis. What the report hints at, without actually saying so is that while much time and money have been expended in pursuit of these ‘remedial’ undertakings, the substantive problems continue to fix the nation with an unflinching stare.
Problems like the tenuous grasp which the bureaucrats tasked with managing our education system appear to have on the core problems; the quality of teachers we are releasing into the classroom; the patent lack of incentive for bright and creative people to join the teaching service; the ridiculous conditions of service, not least the peppercorn rates of pay afforded qualified teachers; the protracted condition of disrepair in which many state-run schools find themselves; the inability of the education system to effectively implement a regime of discipline and good order in schools…and the list goes on. Collectively, these add up to a system that is palpably dysfunctional. Tinkering occasionally and inexpertly with a broken system (which is what successive governments seek to do) and falling back on the familiar resort of empty rhetoric while the true nature of the problems continue to stare us in the face has not worked and never will.
Whereas the advent of the contemporary wave of private schools has brought its own challenges, the fact of the matter is that twenty first century private primary and secondary education in Guyana has derived directly from government’s failure to deliver “free education” to a level that meets national expectations and responds to developmental priorities. An option was offered and thousands of parents unhesitatingly made a choice.
By the standards of venality that continue to inhabit the very bowels of the state bureaucracy, the revelation that numbered amongst the nation’s teachers are ‘ghosts,’ teachers who simply do not exist, is by no means shocking. Beyond the endemic corruption that this revelation underscores, it makes a poignant point about the indifference and inattentiveness of those whose job it is to properly oversee the administration of education. The big worry of course is not only that this discovery may pass without any undue fuss but also that we are probably blissfully unaware of other equally unpalatable indiscretions ensuing within the system and which are either being carefully ‘protected’ by the perpetrators or else, being entirely overlooked.
It is perhaps worth mentioning at this juncture that while the remit of the COI does not deal with university education, University of Guyana Vice Chancellor, Professor Ivelaw Griffith, stated in a recent interview that in some respects the challenges facing education delivery at UG are not altogether dissimilar to those facing the wider education system. Specifically, he alluded to the human resource deficiencies at the University that impair its ability to adequately deliver on its obligations to the nation, which limitations apply equally to the rest of the education system and which successive governments have appeared decidedly reluctant to accept, far less seek to remedy.
It is to the substantive report of the COI, its perspective on the problems confronting the country’s education system and its recommended remedies that we must look in the period ahead. Beyond hoping that it does not take another extended period for the final report of the COI to materialize, we must hope too that its recommendations provide carefully thought out ideas on how to deal with the thorny issues like the creation of the type of curriculum we need to deliver the kind of education that is responsive to the nation’s developmental needs, going forward; the affordability/sustainability of free education; affording our teachers the quality training that significantly enhances classroom delivery capabilities; providing better-appointed and better-equipped schoolhouses; significantly improve the quality of education delivery in the non-coastal and hinterland regions and infusing the requisite level of dignity and status into the teaching profession by implementing a far more deserving regimen of rewards for teachers.
These may not be all of the remedial measures that are required but they are among the fundamental ones. The system cannot and will not be mended if these are not fixed, a priori. Meanwhile, we must not only hope that the final report of the COI deals honestly and frankly with the key weaknesses in the system but that the customary official habit of dragging things out does not persist interminably. Otherwise, the whole effort would have been a shameful waste of time and resources.
