IT is Education Month again-a yearly international activity spawned elsewhere which we have taken onboard as a nation. In spite of some grand individual performances by our children, we lag behind the real world by light years in terms of educational standards. We all know that, and the Honourable Minister of Education knows it better than most. This month and every day after for the next 10 years we must stop the uttering of platitudes– good sounding but meaningless words.
That great physicist, Albert Einstein, wrote: “Imagination is more important than knowledge; knowledge is finite, but imagination encircles the globe.” This is the sort of genius that we cannot seem to produce from our education system in Guyana and the West Indies. And that is because we as leaders or elders do not seem able to use our imagination to envisage the future for our children. With imagination, we can begin the task of cultivating our talent within our educational institutions, in our homes, and in our communities.
Our educators at all levels and especially our policymakers must begin with simple questions. This is not easy since the ego offers impediments. Simplicity takes work. Geniuses make the most complex things seem simple; the mediocre makes the simplest things appear complicated. We do not need BBM or Facebook self-admiring one-liners. We do not need big and expensive conferences nor multiple workshops and seminars. Those fashionable things can come later. The greats that made our world a better place did not have those things. Einstein did not; his work was done mostly in isolation. Quiet contemplation and the exercise of our imagination would do. Here are eight fundamental questions: who are our students and who will our students be as individuals and as citizens of Guyana? what should we teach? how should we teach it? how will our students learn? what are society’s needs? how does society expect us to meet those needs? what role will learning play and how will we pay for it?
If these questions are directly or easily answered, it is likely that some form of strategic management (by this or any other name) already exists within the nation. If, however, these questions cannot be directly or easily answered, then the education system is probably lagging and we need to arrive at forms of major planning, such as strategic planning, that will better prepare our children and adults to advance themselves and the nation out of the educational wilderness in which we have found ourselves. We know that currently in Guyana, these questions have not even been asked much less answered. All of our previous governments have failed in this regard. We currently assess our educational performance by simply counting the numbers of subjects passed or failed or by looking at grades. Previous governments have demonstrated a distressing absence of vision. We need to awaken from this slumber immediately and have these asked and answered; failing which, our children are doomed.
As usual, we assess our success by gazing at examination results. This simplistic numbers-crunching does not amount to much. It certainly does not amount to meaningful analysis. We busy ourselves talking percentages and break it all down into subjects and number of passes. It may be useful to gauge how better or worse our children are performing compared to performance percentages in previous years, but that is about as far as it goes.
The private schools seem to be out-performing our public schools. Why is this so? What is it that the private-school teachers and children are doing that we are not doing in public schools? Are the teaching and learning environments and conditions better in the former than in the latter? Are there background factors in play–like social and familial circumstances? It is also distressing when the people giving us these figures stake claim to the success of children and teachers that do the work. It is latrine politics.
But all of this takes a great deal of work, competence, and dedication. If we do not have work ethic, competence and dedication, we will not ask nor answer the questions asked above. But here is the rub: if we do not ask the questions and get the answers, we will never have the work ethic, competence or dedication.