IN an interview with one section of the media, Education Minister Priya Manickchand had said: “There are now more trained teachers across the system who enjoy the best salary [sic] and most benefits than teachers have ever enjoyed before. The country has achieved universal primary education, and 85 per cent of its nursery-aged children are in school.

Guyana is getting the best exam results we have ever gotten as a country in both the primary and secondary sectors; and there is a concerted drive to attain universal secondary education. More children from the hinterland can access a good education than ever before. These are simply facts that cannot be disputed.”
Guyana’s history may not have taken the direction it did and colonialism could have been extended or probably still be the rule had it not been, to a large extent, for the initiatives of Dr. Cheddi Jagan. The senior Jagan provided financial support, moral guidance and insisted upon and encouraged Cheddi to achieve an education despite greatly penurious and socially challenging circumstances at the time.

In the 1949 report of the Director of Education, the lack of resources and understaffing responsible for high illiteracy graph indices were admitted. However, Dr. Jagan identified the real problem for low literacy ratings among the offspring of Afro and Indo families (Amerindian children were unquantifiable statistics), as, “a result of discriminatory selection of candidates (for the acutely limited spaces in secondary schools), secondary schools remained accessible only to a few.”
He continued, “At Queen’s College, the main government secondary school, many pupils of poor Indian and African parentage were rejected, mainly because the places were filled by children of the wealthy.”

Those were the factors, and driven by his experiences that motivated Dr. Jagan’s relentless exertions to make educational opportunities available to all of the nation’s children. It was during the PPP’s second term in office that Cabinet initiated the passing of legislation for government to take control of primary schools to allow for equitable opportunities for all the children in the country.

Previously, although the government owned all the schools, except for private ones, they had been managed by Christian denominations, and the Christian Social Council decreed that pupils had to become Christians, with accompanying name changes, in order to gain entry. Under the auspices and guidance of the PPP’s Education Minister CV Nunes, during the term of office 1961-1964, technical education, teachers’ training and secondary education facilities were greatly expanded.
In the West on Trial, Dr. Jagan wrote: “The University of Guyana was set up in September 1963 to provide higher education inside the country for a large number of students who, before, could not afford to go abroad. Many primary schools were converted into all-age schools, providing free secondary education to children up to the level of the General Certificate of Education.”

Once cynically alluded to as “Jagan’s Night School,” now places are greatly coveted at the University of Guyana — Guyana’s main tertiary education institution
In addition, more schools were built with enhanced facilities, accommodation and staffing, while teachers were afforded specialised training with better pay and benefits. Hinterland communities enjoyed, for the first time, equitable opportunities for acquiring education through scholarship programmes and dormitories to accommodate students from remote, far-flung areas. A love of writing and literature enabled prolific output and when he was imprisoned for six months in 1954 for breaking the movement restrictions order, Dr. Jagan produced “Forbidden Freedom” and many other pieces of literature.

Martin Carter, Wilson Harris, Jan Carew and other literary persons were frequent visitors to the Jagans’ home. This may have been primarily because of the one luxury the Jagans indulged in — a well-stocked library, for they never stopped searching for knowledge even in their later years.
The literary grouping included Dr. Jagan and Arthur Seymour, all of whom attended the weekly Discussion Circle of the Carnegie Library, now the National Library. In 1966, Dr. Cheddi Jagan published his autobiographical work, ‘The West on Trial,’ acclaimed as ‘a monumental study of the social, political and economic history of Guyana from the time of European colonisation to 1966.’

His ‘A New Global Human Order,’ published in 1999, advocating a new socio-economic dispensation on Planet Earth to eliminate poverty and hunger worldwide, has been adopted by the United Nations.
Not only did Dr. Jagan lead the march for democracy and freedom, he also drove the paradigm for liberation of the mind through the provision of educational apparatuses to facilitate the availability of education to all Guyanese, irrespective of age or any divides in the nation. He undisputedly contributed prolifically to the drive for intellectual upliftment in the nation.
Dr. Cheddi Jagan dreamt his dreams and the party he founded is concretising those dreams into reality.