Dear Editor,
I visited Guyana after a while and what broke my heart was the state of the students that I spoke to, we have really fell over the last decade. I took the time to study the Education Strategy from 2021 – 2025 and I am aghast that it is just another document but Guyana cannot see the results and we are in 2025. What have we done over these years?
But I will be careful since the silly season has started and I see the Ministry of Education is pushing a publication stating that the Student Cash Grant was reinstated and is now $45,000 per student.
Mind you from what I observed in Guyana within the bottom 50% of the people, much deserved and we must all be grateful for these funds. However, how is this helping the students in the bottom 50% of the society pursue their core agenda, which should be knowledge?
The Strategic Goal of the Education Ministry says it plans to “eliminating illiteracy, enhancing tolerance, and modernizing education”. So how is this being done? By building schools? Do we need a school at St George’s Cathedral? Which child lives there?
Do we need a school a the busy corner of Camp and Middle Street? Again which child lives there? Students will be coming from miles away just to attend these schools. Would it not have been wiser to build the schools closer to where the students live? Why not build a school at Durban Park?
Can you eliminate illiteracy by building schools only? Certainly not. What is missing is the soft power in the system – properly trained teachers who adequately paid and equipped with the tools to keep them fully motivated. What I saw at a school in Brickdam from the teachers who were collecting the $100,000 expose that we have many thugs teaching our children.
There is a total breakdown in the culture and ethics from the adults that are being asked to produce functionally literate graduates. This is missing in the Guyana school system and this is why I would say the entire Education Strategy is failing in Guyana irrespective of how many Facebook and social media posts the Minister puts up.
The system must be designed to produce functionally literate graduates, be it academic or vocational. Every single student in the system must be tracked. Their functional literate abilities must be monitored constantly for setbacks and a mechanism must be built around those who are being left behind.
If the Minister is to visit East Ruimveldt Secondary, she will appreciate where I am coming from since from what I saw around that school, we are generating minibus conductors at that school and nothing else. If the Minister does not agree, I challenge her to show the examination pass rates at that school for the pass three years. If the students of East Ruimveldt Secondary are failing, then Guyana is failing and the entire Ministry of Education is failing.
School is a place where children associate in a structured and supervised environment and where their prospects are influenced in a thousand ways. If we are going to be producing minibus conductors at East Ruimveldt Secondary School, then we need to send these folks to a minibus vocational center, because it does not take much to shout “south, south, south”, push someone in a bus, listen to “raga, rega noise in a minibus” and make change for a thousand dollar. The skill set required for such a job does not need five years of time in a secondary school. You are wasting the system and you are wasting that young person’s time.
A good education system arises when good knowledge is transferred and social advantages are gained by the students. A child at East Ruimveldt Secondary does not have an equal chance at any of these things as compared to a child at Bishops High School and that is a crying shame. We cannot have a Strategic Plan for Guyana’s Education claim that we want to modernize education and everything at schools like East Ruimveldt Secondary is to send these students into a state of backwardness.
You cannot claim you are modernizing education and the students of East Ruimveldt Secondary are released into the system as functional illiterates who cannot even write an application letter to Banks DIH or any other company. You cannot claim you are enhancing tolerance when the system is rigged to propel a child from Bishop High School to greatness, which is welcomed, but subject the child from East Ruimveldt Secondary to the doldrums.
Plus the child from Bishops High School is more likely to migrate away from Guyana, sharing all of that good education that the nation has transferred to them to a foreign society, leaving us with the underskilled and under-prepared graduate from East Ruimveldt Secondary.
We therefore should not be surprised at the decline in ethics, education, and morality in Guyana since the education strategy for 2021 to 2025 of the Ministry of Education is misguided and not programmatically geared to help those who need the help the most.
In conclusion, the Student Cash Grant of $45,000 per student cannot be seen as an enhancer to the students, it is an obligation and entitlement that is mandatory. No need to show off, it is our money, not the Minister’s money. In a country where we just earned $1,341,000,000,000 (that is over one trillion Guyana dollars) from our oil industry between 2020 to 2024, we think that $45,000 per year per student is something to brag about?
We have a long way to go to properly emancipate ourselves from this one-tracked propaganda from the Ministry of Education. Just look at the education system in Barbados and Jamaica and see how far advance they are at helping their students at their East Ruimveldt Secondary (their poor sections of the society).
Yours truly,
Emily Lorrimer