The Ministry, the University and Guyanas Future

Stabroek News, Sunday, November 13, 2011 - By David A Granger The University of Guyana will observe its 50th anniversary two years from now in 2013. Will that anniversary be a celebration of achievement as a centre of academic excellence or will it be a charivari of complaints about underfunding, understaffing, under-equipping and underperformance? The campuses of the University of the West Indies in other Caribbean countries such as those in Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados have become platforms for the new scientific and entrepreneurial lites which are leading their countries economies into the new millennium. The University of Guyana, if it is to join that lite club and if this country is ever to compete with its sister Caribbean Community states, deserves better treatment by the Ministry of Education. The call for increased funding as expressed in the leaked confidential Report to the Council by the Vice-Chancellor and the responses by the Minister of Education and the Pro-Chancellor to the effect that increased funding will be tied to a review of the universitys Strategic Plan suggest that the ministry and the university are on a collision course over the latters future. The question is: who will suffer most from the administrations attitude? H G Wells wrote several decades ago, Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. Catastrophe will eventually win the contest in this country unless people who are serious about education take control of the situation. Education is essential to a nations survival and success yet, every year, thousands of boys and girls drop out of primary and secondary schools in this country. Some of those who remain are unlikely to be functionally literate or numerate. Most are unlikely to enter university. The majority of the 17,000 children who wrote the National Grade Six Assessment Examinations failed in all four subjects. The majority of the students who wrote the Caribbean Secondary Examination Certificate still cannot achieve pass grades in English and Mathematics. The education system is too important to our nations future to be held hostage by present-day political duelling between the ministry and the university. Everyones freedom is diminished by a system that allows academic apartheid one that hampers or hinders the education of young people, even in a not-so-top university. Education, at the elementary level, used to be aimed at training local masses to function at the lowest levels of the colonial system. The world has changed. Young people now need to be educated in the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and commerce to enable them to pursue private enterprise rather than rely on the state for employment. Young people now need to be educated not only at the primary and secondary levels but also at the tertiary level in order to overcome the challenges of the new millennium. Our national university is at the heart of our national education system and it must be adequately funded to change with the times.

Employment is the main means by which people make their living. Social change in Guyana in the late 20th century, however, instead of enhancing the education of the individual, seems to have started to make the country a caricature of plantation society of the 18th century. Too many young people today, owing largely to the deficiencies in the education system, are being forced into employment in the proliferation of personal services instead of joining the educated lite to transform Guyanas economy. Guyana is not an island. It is part of a world in which communication technology and economic interdependence have transformed human life swiftly. Some highly-educated societies, even small countries like ours, have succeeded in providing a higher quality of life for their citizens through the adoption of modern technologies for information and education. We can do the same. Why then should the administration be so blind to the shoddy conditions on the universitys campus? Why should the administration be so deaf to the complaints even from its own appointed vice-chancellors? The administrations strategy seems to have been merely to maintain its control of the Council and to obstruct the transformation process. In this way, it keeps the university on life support without providing adequate resources to allow it to pursue an autonomous path of academic development. The ministry-university collision has had repercussions at the Cyril Potter College of Education and throughout the education system. Derek Boks well-known aphorism If you think education is expensive, try ignorance is relevant here. The ministry has adopted a cheapo approach to funding the university. The result has been that ignorance in the form of indiscipline and anti-social behaviour has been increasing in the schools and throughout the national educational system. What then should be the purpose of a national university? What will our national university be like when it celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2013? Should our university not pave the way for empowering a new enterprising generation of young people who could pursue the good life in a free nation? Education is an entitlement funded from the public purse. It is not the benefaction of an indulgent government. If citizens fail to safeguard that entitlement, this country could end up in a state of educational apartheid two separate societies one educated and empowered and the other uneducated, unemployed and poor. Is this what we want for Guyana?

(Originally published here: http://www.stabroeknews.com/2011/features/11/13/the-ministry-theuniversity-and-guyana%E2%80%99s-future/)