In quick succession, between June 8th and June 25th, the Government of Guyana released news, first, of the signing of a contract worth $688 million for the rebuilding of a new Christ Church Secondary School to replace the one destroyed by fire back in January, and just last week, the commissioning of a $585 million ‘state-of-the-art’ Abram Zuil Secondary School in Region Two.
Expenditure on two schools totalling in excess of one billion dollars over such a short period of time is not something that customarily occurs in Guyana. In a sense, the near simultaneous disclosures serve as a reminder, if, indeed, one is needed, that we are (as we say in Guyana) rolling in it, petro dollars, that is. It symbolizes, we hope, an indication that government stands prepared to continue to fork out generously for education since, as the available evidence has long suggested, an absence of the skills that are necessary to strategically direct the petro dollars that we anticipate in a relevant developmental direction will mean a missed opportunity for a country which, historically, has always been linked to poverty and underdevelopment.
Here the point should be made that the examples of countries in the Middle East (some of which Guyana has swiftly established close ties) that are seeking to use their oil wealth to meaningfully shift their respective development trajectories are insightful and, in some instances, altogether worthy of emulation.
For a country like ours, significant investment in education, not least, secondary education, can never really be less than worthwhile since, over time, officialdom has always been unable to match the education as a nation-builder rhetoric with its actualization. What the country’s promised economic transformation had done is to take us, hopefully, to the actualization of a time-worn slogan. Once we carefully analyze the country’s new-found development openings we are bound to realize that our decidedly worn out political rhetoric alone amounts to smoke without fire and will, in the final analysis, take us nowhere.
Nor are we likely to get very far if every meaningful development – whether it occurs in the education sector or in any other – has to be adorned with political rhetoric. We saw some of that in what Education Minister Priya Manickchand had to say during the recent opening of the new Abram Zuil complex. Using the commissioning of a school designed to serve the nation as a whole as an opportunity to make political comparisons that do nothing but stir up the political rivalries while serving no helpful purpose does not belong at the commissioning intended to serve the nation as a whole.
One of the more significant things about the new Abram Zuil complex is that it serves to help make the point that the highest levels of secondary education that the country has to offer are not necessarily Georgetown-centred and that children residing in rural (and hinterland) communities can benefit from a comparable level of secondary education. This will take an effort that goes beyond the creation of impressive edifices.
If it is true that the significance of the Abram Zuil complex reposes in its role in helping to erase the ingrained notion that here in Guyana a sound secondary education begins and ends in the capital, for the most part, the new Abram Zuil complex challenges government to now add the trimmings that will help to take secondary schooling to the next level. The real significance of the new Abram Zuil Secondary School does not repose solely in the ‘grandness’ of the multi – million dollar complex alone. If that is, all too frequently, the barometer used by politicians to measure progress, this has to change if we are to fully reap the benefits of significant monetary investments in initiatives that ought, correctly, to be designed to help us grow. Meaningfully following up on the new school complex will require investment in sufficient numbers of sufficiently well-trained teachers to reach across what, these days, is a curriculum that has expanded to meet the contemporary skills needs, locally as well as globally. Here it has to be said that we cannot hope to do justice to the Abram Zuil investment unless even further investment is made in the requisite add-ons.
When we contemplate training we are going to have to contemplate, simultaneously, the necessity for a regional buildout of satellite (training) institutions and the recruitment of sufficient trainers (who are, themselves, competent to deliver to expectations) sufficient not only to cover the various geographic regions but also, the various disciplines that are going to be necessary to fashion a suitable curriculum that is responsive to the requirements of our development trajectory.
Here, government will be continually challenged to recruit and retain the skills necessary for the realization of the exalted objectives that will attend to incremental upgrading of our education system. This upgrading undertaking will have to include the recruitment of the relevant instructors and targeted investment in the inventory that will become incrementally necessary to take the teacher training curriculum where it needs to go.
Our biggest challenge, going forward may well lie not so much in our capacity to erect the physical structures and administrative mechanisms necessary to serve as the bricks and mortar of our education system. At some junctures we will be required to behave as a nation, to subsume political differences beneath the imperative of taking the country forward. Here, the question arises as to whether, given what plays out in the contemporary arena, we are still able to rise above, to sometimes jettison partisan political imperatives and to embrace the notion of the common good. Here, the way forward is going to have to repose in, somehow, us fashioning a formula that acknowledges political differences which exist but which at critical moments, must be subsumed beneath the necessity to embrace a common approach for the sake of the nation. Worryingly, our political culture does not appear to have matured to the point where the issue of the greater good can supersede partisan politics. That is a hump that we are simply going to have to work to get over if we are not to remain on the fringes of global relevance.
