‘Teacher Sharon’, Kumawattie Ramkoomar Isurdeen, is a quiet, unassuming young woman who serves as Head of the Department of Agriculture Science at Cummings Lodge Secondary School and who believes that the drive to enhance her charges’ enthusiasm for the discipline has to be designed to take them beyond seeing it as just another subject to add to their list of CXC ‘conquests’.
She believes that over time the discipline of Agriculture Science has become sufficiently important to Guyana’s economy and to its food security ambitions to cause it to play a greater role on the school curriculum. That is why she is advocating that the teaching of Agriculture Science in schools be taken to ‘the next level’. It is time, she says, that the cultivation of crops and the rearing of livestock as subjects on the school curriculum benefit from a level of technological application that compares favourably with that which applies in the substantive agricultural sector.