I’VE been told that our youth don’t read, and I’m convinced that illiteracy is prevalent at different levels of our society.I’ve heard compelling stories, and benefitted from demonstrations by responsible managers about limitations in respect of simple bookkeeping reports, coming from young people who claim to have had a sound secondary education.
I’m convinced that there is a problem, and I don’t think that this is surprising to the current administration.
I was again summoned by my friend from the Lions to participate in a poster-development activity involving children between the ages of eight and 13.
The Meadowbrook-Tucville community is his area of choice. I was taken there and introduced to the class of artists. I call these children artists because of their enthusiasm.
The school, like numerous other art schools here, has no art teacher. My friend then showed me printouts of the international winners of the last competition; they were children within the same age group. I implored him not to show the children we were dealing with these posters, as those former winners were obvious products of art tutelage.
This competition is open to children across the English-speaking world, I assume. Personnel at the same school told me that the children “don’t read”. I asked if there is a library; the reply was, “Yes”. I compared the methods of reading in school when I was in school, and I was told that that was not what was happening today.
SMALL DAYS

Back then, Reading was a subject; so was Dictation. And reading was addressed with not only the standard reading book, but with library books.
The week’s readers would sit in front with similar books spread among their classmates; the first reader would introduce the book and its author. Then he or she would read the first two paragraphs, followed by the next student. When the ‘big-words’ came up, as they usually did, the teacher would encourage raised hands from other students; then the word would be dissected into syllables, and the class would become familiar with a new word. And it worked for the majority of us.
There’s an important factor to the books we used for reading, and the prescribed reading book: They were all illustrated.
During that ‘junior’ period, I lived ‘up the Coast’ with my god-parents, next to a family whose youngest member, who was older than I, had not too long before held my hand to school; to ‘Lil ABC’.
It was a traumatic period of her life; that most vivid memory still remains with me. When her foster-grandfather abruptly decided that her school days were over and threw her school books out of the bedroom window, I ran over and picked the books up. She told me, between tears, to take them. They were a collection of Nelson West Indian Readers. I never used these books in school, but I was familiar with the pictures. Then, with time, I read the text; and I began trying to paint my versions of the paintings they carried. Though I didn’t learn yet about mixing my cheap water colours, I still tried to paint the Death of Hector.
The experience of Art at an early age encouraged me to read. It can be argued today that TV has taken over the minds of our children, but I beg to differ. Most likely, they have been abandoned to the whims and fantasies of whatever alternative imagery occupies untutored spaces.
The primary school books created in the 1970s, which seem to have vanished, used the same methods by the designers at Curriculum Development, administered by the educator, Oswald Kendall, former headteacher of Christ Church back when I came into contact with that institution. That was responsible for publishing my first and only poetry book.
COLONIAL BUT EFFECTIVE
The experience I related with the Nelson West Indian Readers merely explores a template that was successful; its criticisms rest with its content: Colonial; for a colony but its methodology is still used.
The visuals today in other primary-secondary literature may be digital photography or artwork, but the combination of art and text is state-of-the art in any age. The other factor is that some children are coming to school hungry; this is not a factor that can be ignored or left unchecked.
Like the Trojan Horse, I recognise that art must enter the schools as music has done, to stimulate the interest of reading across young Guyana.
I asked a professional artist employed with the government why, over the years, have graduates from the Burrowes School of Art never shown any interest in teaching.
I was told that was not true; that they did, but the heads of schools told them that it couldn’t happen, because Art wasn’t on the timetable.
I truly reflect on those European medieval dungeons, in this case populated by hungry Bourda Market rats, when I think that past Ministers of Government removed music, art and drama from the exposure stage of our young minds.
The question may very well be asked, What does the visual, vocal and rhythmic arts contribute? Well, cast your imagination to the dawn of human time, and imagine our terrified ancestors, gathered around the fire with their primitive weapons close at hand, to conquer the compelling fear of survival with insanity on its periphery.
The silence is broken when the storyteller begins to weave his first tale. A tune is hummed, a flute follows the hum, and a confident drum-beat invokes defiance against whatever lurks beyond their protective flames, while, on the walls of a nearby rock, an artist records that they were there, so we may know, millennia to come.
In the book by Michael Ayre, ‘THE CARIBBEAN IN SEPIA: A HISTORY IN PHOTOGRAPHS (1840-1900)”, Guyana is recorded as having, by 1891, a population of 1,200 teachers, second only to Jamaica.
Our first recorded local artist in Georgetown is mentioned on Page 35 of James Rodway’s ‘THE STORY OF GEORGETOWN’.
According to Rodway, “In 1811, a Panorama of Stabroek was opened on the site of the present Water Works. Mr. Bryant, portrait and scene painter, was the parent of the work, ‘Alone he did it’, the only instance of the kind ever known, where an individual has undertaken a task of such a nature without any assistance, except the mere automation help of a slave.”
If you’ve ever seen any of Joshua Bryant’s work, you will know that it required much more than the support work of an automaton; but bigotry compelled Rodway to erase this man’s name [the slave] and negate his talent. These works have, however, played a tremendous part in drawing us into the text of Bryant’s narrative of the 1823 insurrection.
My colleague, Ohene, of the National Gallery has voiced a significant proposal, enveloping the visual arts, that of a Legal ACT empowering a policy that will bring the creative arts into the national perspective. We have the talents, but a bureaucratic mental block cannot envision the creative way forward.