THE Burnham Foundation, a non-profit organisation that aims to keep alive the memory of Guyana’s first Executive President Forbes Burnham, has arranged a symposium to discuss the restoration of President’s College (PC), which was established upon his initiative as a school of excellence.The Burnham Foundation’s Public Relations Officer Clayton Hinds in an interview with this publication, said the symposium is slated for 15:00 hrs this Sunday at the Critchlow Labour College auditorium in Georgetown.
“We feel that the school has not been able to fulfil its mandate as a result of the derailing of the programmes and plans that had ushered its introduction into the Guyanese society, [and] into the education sector of Guyana,” he told the Guyana Chronicle.
Among those who are expected to attend will be representatives from the Ministry of Education, the President’s College administration, past students, concerned citizens and members of the foundation. They will be engaged in a vital exchange session to develop a consensus on the way forward for the senior secondary school which is located at Golden Grove, East Coast Demerara.
Hinds said having this exposition, the foundation hopes to “put back on course the role that the school can play in providing the type of education for which it has been introduced in this country [and] feel that it’s a credit to Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham. He is considered to be a real visionary in the field of education to have conceptualised and developed this college with a view to ensuring that young people who would have performed excellently in this country, at “Common Entrance” as it was then called, can be exposed to a holistic form of education that can make them into a complete Guyanese.”
The college was intended to expose children to a complete set of modules in the area of education that would have made them into complete Guyanese to take the country to another level, Hinds said.
He contended that “if we’re talking about building and promoting this holistic Guyanese person, about understanding our culture, understanding our history, understanding our geography, understanding our development focus, understanding our role internationally in relation to our responsibilities to our CARICOM brothers and sisters…those things need to be taught, because we’re going to be producing young people who are equipped to not just academically represent the core subjects that make us bright, but who will understand everything Guyanese.”
Had it not been for the downgrading of the school, Hinds argued, many young Guyanese would have been exposed to that unique education plan which would have prevented the paucity of leadership skills in the Guyanese youth.
“A lot of young people have never travelled this country… various ethnic groups form part of the student body,” he stated, adding that if the original design of the school’s curriculum is adopted, students would understand how not to have “any rancour about ethnic origins.”
By Shauna Jemmott