A FEW weeks ago, when we were all celebrating the top performers after the announcement of this year’s Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC)’s results, I started thinking about the tertiary education sector a bit more. Since then, I believe that we have been focused on celebrating students’ efforts at overcoming adversity, instead of agreeing that there should be greater access to opportunities for those students.
When the results were announced, a Facebook friend opined that those stories of overcoming adversity aren’t as heartwarming as we perceive them to be. For her, those stories spotlight many systemic failures. One failure is that children burden themselves by pursuing too many subjects (coupled with the extra lessons and extra workload) just for the chance at a scholarship, as opposed to knowing that regardless of how many subjects they write, they will be able to pursue a sound tertiary education.
The more I think about this comment, the more I agree with her.
Sure, when those results are announced, and at times when social media is inundated with posts about people graduating from their universities, there is a sense of collective pride. And I love it. There is something incredibly heartwarming about people celebrating themselves and their accomplishments, and seeing others celebrate them too.
Even so, I realise that overcoming adversity to achieve what should be commonplace is not necessarily the goal. The goal should be easy, equitable access for all.
This year, I’ve been more reflective than usual, reflecting on my friend’s comments, and my own experiences. This column is deeply personal. Recently, I graduated from the University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine. Strangely, I haven’t felt celebratory or euphoric in any way. What I do feel is a sense of relief that it is all over, because it has been an incredibly arduous and taxing journey. More importantly, I realise now that I am not gracious enough to say that whatever struggles I encountered along the way made the journey more fruitful.
Frankly, if I had the opportunity to study without balancing it alongside a full-time job that funded my pursuits, I believe I would have been able to immerse myself much more in the tertiary education journey. Perhaps, I could have found the time to pursue other interests like sports or anything. But that wasn’t the case. Like many others, a scholarship was my best chance at a guaranteed tertiary academic journey. Without that scholarship, I needed to work and save to fund any tertiary studies I wanted to pursue.
This isn’t me using this space to bemoan my challenges or lament that I could not secure a scholarship in Guyana. I am trying to underscore the need to understand that some of the challenges in our education system are systemic. I am a loud champion of students writing as many subjects as they want to at the CXC level if that’s what they want to do. I am, however, a product of a system that compelled me to pursue a high number of subjects as part of the competitive process of copping a scholarship. If tertiary education was free, or if there were many more opportunities to transition to tertiary education, there would be no NEED to write many subjects, and, for some of us, we could focus on our academic pursuits just a little longer, or with some greater degree of ease (unless we wanted to balance studies and the world of work). These aren’t unfathomable or unachievable things, especially now that we are hyper-focused on developing the country’s human capital to respond to the needs of a developing economy.
As I have written before, to Guyana’s credit, there have been efforts at equalising education delivery, and making resources more available. Textbooks and educational content were created for learners at the lower academic levels. Where Internet facilities could not be immediately established or improved, other means of broadcasting information (television stations and radio channels) were strengthened. The Guyana Online Academy of Learning (GOAL), a massive Online scholarship scheme, is another good initiative that provides many with access to higher education.
Recently, President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali spoke of these efforts at a United Nations summit on education, and he highlighted the government’s ambitious plans to improve education in Guyana, including increasing national spending on education to 20 per cent of the country’s national budget. Importantly, concerning this column, he reiterated his party’s Manifesto promise of free tertiary education by 2025.
These efforts signal that policymakers are well aware of the challenges that exist. What’s left is for them to make good on their promises, and continuously assess the needs of the education sector, and a population that is increasingly demanding higher educational opportunities so that additional plans can be developed and executed. Again, these are not unfathomable or unachievable things.
If you would like to connect with me to discuss the column or any of my previous work, please feel free to email me at: vish14ragobeer@gmail.com
