EDUCATION Minister Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine said Friday that our best bet as a nation is to plant the tree of education, which will in time benefit Guyana’s next generation.Reflecting on the significance of the National Tree Planting Day Initiative, launched last week, Dr Roopnaraine drew an interesting correlation between trees, children, education and growth in the society.

In the words of Roman comic poet, Caecilius Statius in describing a fellow Roman, he told the sizeable gathering at the National Park for the annual Education Month rally:
“He plants trees to benefit the next generation,” adding:
“All of you gathered here today are part of a system, the core purpose of which is to plant a tree to benefit the next generation; that tree is education, and it is our responsibility to ensure it grows and blossoms within each and every child.”

With the education system in the rebuilding phase at present, he underscored how imperative it is for Guyanese to cultivate in their children two fundamental qualities which he believes will be critical to their survival as a people. The first quality, he said, is that of mutual respect for each other’s culture.

Offering that no natural ecosystem can sustainably exist with one component excluding all others, he noted that no human society can sustainably exist with one culture or ethnic group creating and maintaining hegemony over another.

And he pointed out that our greatest strength as a people lies in the fact that we possess cultural diversity. But this diversity, he added, is the very thing which according to our history has divided us.

STILL HOPE
However, there is still hope. Roopnaraine offered that once we are able to fix these issues, it will serve us well in a world in which our survival as a small country will largely be determined by how we can interact with our counterparts and other cultures in an environment of mutual respect and cooperation. “This entails the sort of massive cultural paradigm shift that the education system will be central in undertaking,” he asserted.

“As we close off the activities for Education Month and get down to the business of putting in place the policy directives we have assigned ourselves in the various sub-sectors, let us recommit to planting the seeds of tolerance, of knowledge and of mutual respect for the sake of our next generation,” Dr. Roopnaraine added.

Not limited to respect for cultural diversity, Dr. Roopnaraine stated that the second quality needed to be cultivated in children is that of respect for the natural environment.

Positing that climate change is threatening to replace war as the leading source of human misery and underdevelopment in the world, the Education Minister reasoned that the consensus is that this condition is as a direct result of human action.

To this end, he referenced the drought currently affecting the Rupununi which he described as not being a force which discriminates in terms of culture or ethnicity. The effects of environmental challenges, he argued, cannot be combated if we remain divided as a people.

The education system, the minister added, has to accept as a critical mandate environmental matters and the primary responsibility to create a culture of conservation remains in the hands of all Guyanese.

He then recalled what he described as a privileged moment just last week when he commissioned a Creative Space building for the United Women for Special Children, an NGO that has been at the forefront of special needs education for almost 30 years.

The Education Minister highlighted his experience of witnessing courageous children committing to their own empowerment despite adverse circumstances.

Acknowledging that the education system should aim to serve every child of this country, he said there is need to focus particularly on those who are faced with severe personal challenges to learning.

“More often than we acknowledge, sometimes those we consider the least among us are – by virtue of their courage and the sheer intensity of their personal struggle – in fact the greatest among us and as a society we owe them the best opportunity we can create,” the minister told the audience.

But moreover, special-needs education, according to him, remains arguably the most significant indicator of overall sector development by virtue of its inherent challenges.

In light of this, he opined, “Once it is, we can confidently say that we as a society have significantly created a system that satisfies our special education needs, the likelihood is that the rest of the education system would have been improved to a satisfactory level as well.”

By Ravin Singh