With almost two complete terms of missed school behind us, we find ourselves in a condition of bewildering uncertainty as to whether we will face a third term of near-complete absence of conventional classroom schooling. It may have been the fearsome likely impact of the dreaded coronavirus that compelled us to close our school doors hastily in March, creating history by setting aside conventional schooling for the single longest period in the history of conventional schooling in Guyana. It has to be said, however, that the political theatre that followed the March 2 general election did not help. COVID-19 may have been the substantive national emergency but the sheer absurdity of the to-ing and fro-ing of the drama associated with the elections results had the effect of significantly shifting attention and resources from mounting anywhere near an adequate response to the huge crisis in the education system resulting from COVID-19 and the attendant schools’ closure.
There are certain facts that we must face about our education system. First, it is a broken down, near dysfunctional system that is wholly inadequate to satisfy the needs of the country’s twenty-first-century development needs. Our education system is overwhelmingly weak at all of its critical points, ranging from management/ administrative capabilities at the level of its professional leadership to a lack of adequacy in the teacher training curriculum to enable the graduates to fully meet the needs of our education system. Talk about curriculum change which has been ensuing across several changes in political administration is no longer taken seriously.
One of the immediate emergencies that arose in our education system once we could no longer rely safely on classroom tuition, was the need to fashion an option based on the application of technological tools and technical skills that would enable us to realise a condition close to normalcy in the delivery of education. The Ministry of Education was unable to mount anywhere near an adequate response in that regard. It simply did not have either the technical or human ‘tools’ with which to do so and in the end it was left largely to the private education system and a handful of state-employed teachers to ‘run with’ the task of creating a half-way-house virtual tuition system, the only option now realistically open to our beleaguered children. It is, truth be told, a black mark on our education system. Over several decades of political drivel about the importance of education to development, what continues to play out is a theatre of failure insofar as fashioning a response to the crisis in our education system resulting from the advent of coronavirus.
As the Ministry of Education appeared to do little more than twiddle its proverbial thumbs, it took the inherent drive of the private sector (mostly private educators and the private school system) to invest in the technological infrastructure necessary to kick-start a limited regime of virtual education delivery. Indeed, there was no evidence whatsoever, of any collaborative initiative involving the Ministry of Education and its various publics, the seeming indifference of the Ministry manifested in the conspicuous ‘absence’ of the then Minister of Education from the ‘helm of the ship’ to personally provide periodic updates, guidance and directives to concerned parents and to the nation as a whole.
The truth in this pronouncement, incidentally, is not intended to appear it to be part of the customary gamesmanship that continues to ‘decorate’ the country’s political landscape. The truth of the matter is, that across the decades, all of the colorations of political leadership have played their own games of ‘monopoly’ with our education system so that its contemporary failures are, unquestionably, a function of a collective political folly.
With a new political administration will doubtless come a political rush ‘of blood,’ an anxiety to make an early impression. That is the nature of our political culture. We will have to wait and see whether the ‘noise’ in the market is, in fact, ‘the sale’, or whether it is just a question of the familiar accumulation of bragging rights that will be quietly laid by the wayside once its political purpose has been served.
We must wait and see what happens. The recent change of political administration could well be seen by the new incumbents as reason to call for ‘time’ to get it right. But that is only a good excuse if we ignore the fact that the various political leaderships have had more than half a century to get it right… and up until now, the paucity of their delivery has been noteworthy.
It is the nation, ultimately that will have to bear the burden, going forward. As this article is being read, there exists a condition of considerable concern amongst parents about the future of their children’s education. Near normalcy will, of course, prevail for the children of the privileged and the children of the not so privileged whose parents are determined to afford not to have their children fall behind.
For the future, a great deal depends on the will of government to recognise the precarious circumstance in which our education system finds itself and the necessity to muster the will to create viable options for education delivery. Here we speak not just about the fashioning of a transformed infrastructure that can adapt to the circumstances created by COVID-19 but also about the re-training of teachers to lift their skills to the requirements of the virtual age and to create a new ‘class’ of education administrators, a ‘class’ that understands the requirements of education in the virtual age.
