Leaving aside – for the moment – the just ended seventy-odd days of industrial action by state-employed teachers, which eventually gave way to discourses between the Ministry of Education and the Guyana Teachers’ Union on the matter of teachers’ emoluments, there had been much earlier indications that large ‘chunks’ of our education system that had to do with the condition of ‘good order’ that is indispensable to an amenable teaching/learning environment had, across a wide swathe of the state-run education system, deteriorated.
This had been manifested in an uproarious assault on that desired in-school environment that enables teaching/learning to proceed in good order. The condition, in some instances, had reached the point of rampage, the primary features of which have been instances of in-school violence that have, in a handful of instances, led to serious injury. Up to this time, a near leaden-footed Ministry of Education is still unable to bring that particular situation under control. Functionaries remained in their ivory towers.
Setting aside what has been, in relatively recent times, instances of significant derailment of the routine teaching/learning regime and the sense of good order that ought to go with it, we have also witnessed a pitched battle between teachers bending their backs to maintain a stable teaching/learning regimen and elements bent on disorder (and here we include pockets of wayward parents and children, and in some instances, hoodlum elements) hell bent on posing physical and emotional challenges for Heads of schools and teachers. Any intervention by the Ministry of Education would appear to have been made from positions of distance and aloofness. Little wonder then that nothing that the Ministry has done has had the effect of pushing back what is, in effect, a concerted attack on the state school system. As parts of the state school system had become increasingly dysfunctional, the Ministry of Education has been unable to put anything on the table to roll back the threat of collapse. Here, it should be stated that the Ministry’s measured interventions have come largely through from-a-distance edicts that have had no greater effect than pouring water on ducks’ backs and waiting for a poodle to materialize.
It would be disingenuous to altogether de-couple the mood of the teachers and their robust response to their Union’s strike call from a pre-existing state of mind that had to do with being considerably under-rewarded in the face of challenges that extended beyond the classroom. It seemed that the animation demonstrated on the picket line – setting aside the root cause of the strike – amounted to a critical interlude of exhalation from the pockets of what, all too frequently, amounted to the unbearable stress associated with managing a teaching/learning regime, whole portions of which had lurched almost completely out of control.
Amidst the tumult, the Ministry of Education appeared to be altogether unmindful of the virtue of managing its own image, one of its particular failings in this regard being its stinginess in neglecting to bestow a generous measure of praise (and other forms of incentives) on teachers for holding the line in the course of what had become an ugly insurrection against good order in several state-run schools. The point should be made, here, that the ‘clean hands’ approach which the Ministry of Education favoured in the battle against the ‘insurrection’ in some state-run schools bears an uncanny resemblance to an earlier horrific occurrence in which school-aged children lost their lives under the ‘watch’ of the Ministry.
If the protracted period of robust teacher support for the strike appeared to ‘back foot’ the Ministry of Education, that is because the Ministry’s functionaries in their ivory towers failed to properly take the ‘on-the-ground’ temperature that had derived from the wider dysfunctional condition that obtained inside much of the state school system. What it appeared to miss most was the sense of frustration among teachers deriving from the gap between emoluments and responsibilities in a challenging state school system on the one hand and a high-cost-of-living country, on the other.
There are lessons to be learnt here and if these are to be learnt the process will have to begin with the Ministry of Education climbing down from its ivory towers from which vantage its eyes remain blinded to the broader picture.
