It would be entirely fair to say that the ‘arrival’ here of the coronavirus pandemic took the country’s education system by storm. Before that, politically, the fallout from the APNU/AFC government’s earlier loss of the no- confidence motion vote in the National Assembly had resulted in a national preoccupation with the implications of that eventuality as well as the equally relevant souring of the national political environment. In a country where even the most damaging of alternative social and economic emergencies usually take ‘second place’ to the never-ending jousting for political power, matters pertaining to the advent of the pandemic and its broader societal implications became ‘lost’ in the midst of the political agenda.
What that preoccupation meant during the earliest period of the pandemic was that the urgency of the malady became buried beneath the political preoccupations that had derived from the eventual outcome of the March 2020 general elections.
It will be recalled that, in some areas, there had been a ‘watering down’ in the capabilities of some critical national support systems, education, notably, being one of those. In the particular instance of education, it was widely felt that the political developments coupled with the advent of the pandemic had caught some national institutions, including the Ministry of Education, in a state of flux, which, coupled with its lack of capacity, in the first place, had left it ill-equipped to proffer anything resembling an effective response to what, by that time, was a looming crisis in the country’s education system.
What was most evident within the education system at that time was a paucity of high-level decision-making capability that, it seemed, being a function of the fact that the functionaries occupying the top tiers of educations administration in Guyana had effectively found themselves, for the most part, in positions that were beyond their respective spheres of experience.
What complicated the situation considerably was the fact that the nature of the pandemic and its behaviour did not lend itself to a sit-still-and-wait-it-out response. Lives were at stake and an overall impact of catastrophic proportions loomed large.
Those days did not amount to our education system’s finest hour. Critical issues relating to, first, keeping the country’s student and teacher population safe became the subject of decision-making voids and how to secure the continuity of education delivery in an environment of non-availability of the communication tools with which to do so became emergencies with which the country never really came to grips.
In an environment in which politics and, more specifically, who governs, has always been considered to be more important than even the most menacing alternative crises, first, the impending 2020 general elections and afterwards the destabilizing interregnum that preceded the change in government did not serve to make the situation any easier. The new political administration sought to create an environment of vigorous emergency response. That, however, suffered from two setbacks. First, there was simply no way that a meaningful option for education delivery could be out in place in the absence of the technological tools with which to do so. Secondly, the efforts of the new education administration regime to respond to the crisis became caught up in political controversy that distracted attention from the substantive problem.
What the necessary closure of schools across the country created was a catastrophic loss of communication between the ‘education system’ and its charges. The nature of the COVID-19 emergency and the attendant political environment did not allow for any kind of orderly retreat into a status quo in which the authorities could still remain in control. Education delivery persisted, after a fashion, in a thoroughly disjointed manner, working, to a point, only in those circumstances where the technological tools were available, to prop up a collapsed system.
What obtained during this period was a kind of ‘free for all,’ ‘survival of the fittest’ state of affairs in which national education delivery descended into pockets of mostly well-intended private initiatives that were bound to benefit only those who were equipped to respond. While it is fair to say that there were instances in which parents, teachers and students raised their respective ‘games’ commendably and considerably, the inability of the authorities to come up with a holistic option meant that for thousands of the country’s school-age children, formal education had come to a grinding halt and there was no telling when the status quo ante would be restored.
If the dislocation in the education system had to be subsumed beneath the increasing sense of national emergency occasioned by the continually rising numbers of afflicted and dead resulting from the pandemic, the consequences of closed schools and the absence of the technological requirements necessary to fashion an alternative education delivery regime were mostly lacking, the inevitable schisms between the political administration and teachers and their union regarding the best direction in which to go created even more headaches. In the final analysis we found ourselves ‘dodging between the raindrops,’ applying make-shift solutions some of which were fraught with risks, having come to the conclusion that the full restoration of a normal education delivery regime had to await a satisfactory level of retreat of the pandemic.
Arguably the most telling impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was the protracted absence from school by thousands of school-age children, particularly those ranging from ‘starters’ up to just below the Grade Six level. There are real fears that the phenomenon may have spawned a whole generation of Guyanese children who will be forced into a ‘catchup’ regime that may well not be able to compensate for the hiatus in formal education delivery.
While there has been no evidence, up until now, that the powers that be have begun to undertake an extensive investigation into the impact of COVID-19 on the national education system and how this is likely to affect us ‘down the road,’ there is already compelling evidence that consequences, almost certainly negative ones, will accrue. In communities across the country there exists much more than anecdotal evidence that the resumption of normal education delivery across the school system has not been attended by a corresponding return of all of those who exited the classroom when the pandemic resulted in the hurried closure of the school doors. What will become of them could be one of our biggest headaches in the future.
