Felician Medino Abraham is from Moruca. He produced a study on the impact of school education on Indigenous people using ethnography in South Rupununi. He has an undergraduate degree in Pedagogy and a Masters in Society and Frontier from the Federal University of Roraima, Brazil.
September is Indigenous Heritage Month. It is also Education Month. In this column I will reflect on the entry of conventional education through schools in indigenous communities, beginning with colonialism. Schooling was designed to “educate us” into being submissive to a foreign, central authority. The strategy was one of social transformation, but with the intention of introducing radical changes to our indigenous cosmology, since indigenous education in essence is based on social interactions and collective actions.
These institutions reconfigured and destroyed many aspects of our original local customs and traditions.
This model of education continues today in the schools in our communities, where in the classroom the teacher dictates knowledge to us as if we are blank slates, and students are mostly passively receiving the information they received because of its rigidity and formality. This educational experience is based on the idea that it is important to school us on the “right way” to be “civilized” according to Western standards. A schooled indigenous person is assumed to be more prepared to accept and assimilate new ideas, hence mainstream education becomes pivotal for us for integration and nation building.
In this conventional education paradigm, what is intended is ultimately to educate us so that we are no longer indigenous people. In other words the aim of this learning approach with its pedagogical work is to make us abdicate our languages, beliefs, cultural patterns, values and behaviours and incorporate us into national society.
Being schooled by this conventional education system over the years raises the question, what does this model of education mean for us in Guyana? We were taught that it’s the best model. One based on competition, on the categorisation and selection of students and where “knowledge” is rated by academic performance. Meanwhile other elements of learning pertaining to our way of life were stifled. On the flipside, this system of education continues to produce some results in providing job opportunities for some of us who performed well academically.
Prior to formal education being introduced in indigenous communities in Guyana in the 18th – 19th century by the British, we had our own ways of learning. Indigenous education consisted of our worldviews: languages, legends, knowledge of the environment, myths, spirituality. We were taught by our elders in our homes, on the land and in the communities. This contrasted with formal education that indoctrinated us to be different and live like westerners in Guyana and in the “civilized world”.
For most of us who came from an indigenous culture and have our unique way of being educated, when we go to school we perceived the classroom as a different place from our original learning environments at home and in the community. When we go to school we meet up with the “school culture,” a classroom decorated with colourful papers and symbols representing a foreign world learning environment. A place comprised of rigid chalk and talk techniques in the classrooms, oriented by an outdated learning pedagogy. And a tunnel vision of how to teach children. In this socio educative reality our learning experience in the classroom becomes a “frontier” where the school culture meets our knowledge from home which sometimes make us feel that our environments – our homes especially – which are our first schools are less valuable.
Unfortunately this frontier in education overrides and dominates our culture as it “educates us” to be end products for market and “development”. This model of education is not making use of the rich diversity of indigenous methods of learning from our cosmology and pedagogy. Mainstream education in Guyana seems too preoccupied with school feeding programmes and uniforms to homogenize us with the rhetoric of “quality education” and simultaneously continues to educate us as if our culture and lifestyles need to be upgraded or left behind.
This education model caters to only a few of us who perform well academically to be educated on the coast principally in Georgetown. The sad reality is that when we hinterland students complete our education in the city there are few job opportunities for us when we return to our communities, and because of this most of us end up remaining in the city to live and work. In our communities, the two common areas to find a government job are to be a teacher or be employed in the health sector ,which not everyone wants to do. This reality reflects the limited scope of job opportunities for us in the interior of Guyana.
The other experience of education as a frontier for us in Guyana is the financial issue faced by many of our families. Most are under pressure to generate financial income to keep us in schools; but even for those of us who pass with high marks, there will be few opportunities for us to pursue studies or even get a job. So sometimes we would ask the question, what is the point of studying?
With the constant exchange of governments, we received a number of schools in our communities. More Nursery, Primary and Secondary learning institutions were built as a way to offer “quality education” to us. This initiative has its positives and negatives, but again this approach won´t make it anything better. Mainstream education continues to fail and make us vulnerable to politicians, churches and others coming into our communities to divide and rule us, especially at elections time.
Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is a specific right that pertains to indigenous peoples and is recognised in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). It allows indigenous peoples to give or withhold consent to a project that may affect us or our territories. Once we have given our consent, we can withdraw it at any stage. Furthermore, FPIC enables us to negotiate the conditions under which the project will be designed, implemented, monitored and evaluated. This is also embedded within the universal right to self-determination.
Shouldn´t this approach be applied to the government too when they enter our villages to introduce education in the community? However, we Indigenous people remain passive to governments – from colonial times to the present – providing education that continues to fail most of us.
There exist Indigenous Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in Guyana that discuss the reality of education offered to us at meetings, but in practice most of these organizations are not focused on lobbying and advocating for quality education for indigenous people that centres indigenous worldviews, perhaps because they are more preoccupied with advocacy for land and other indigenous rights issues. It is my view that the general struggle for indigenous people in Guyana should also be for quality and relevant education, supported by NGOs.
In the 1970-80s the approach was to decolonize education, making it appropriate to the reality of Guyana and that of the Caribbean. However, again this model of education didn’t make use of the indigenous peoples´ customs, languages, and other ways of learning pertinent to our rich cultures.
In this socio educative reality there is need for a new approach to education when it comes to indigenous people in Guyana. One where we can have a part to play in this process by taking the initiative and working on an equal footing with the government. Perhaps with the current pilot programme for Quality Bilingual Wapichan Children (Nursery level) in South Rupununi which is in partnership with the Ministry of Education, this collaborative effort can make a paradigm shift in education with an innovative pedagogy using the local language and culture of the people.
When this new approach in education is successful it could very well be a realization of the United Nation Goal for quality education. Ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education that promotes lifelong learning opportunities for indigenous people and for the rest of the Guyanese population.
