Latest update March 28th, 2024 12:59 AM
Oct 20, 2013 My Column
To listen to the talk around us, we would be left to believe that for all the development, nothing good is happening to the people. Hardly a day goes by without some person not trying to land a job. In fact, things have reached the stage where young people are trying to gain higher qualifications to land a job. There is no worry about over-qualifying. Clerks are therefore turning up with first degrees.
Young people with a ton of passes at the Caribbean Secondary Education Council (CSEC) examinations are complaining that they cannot find jobs. Some of them are really no good, but at least one would expect them to be functional.
Just the other day I heard a remarkable story. There was this clerk who was supposed to write a judge’s comment on a docket. At least she was ingenious. When she did not understand a word she simply wrote “something”. The result is that her comment read that the defendant should be made to ‘something’ which could see a ‘something’ and the rest goes on.
It must be that not much is being taught in schools. People do not reason anymore. For the record, English is not taught anymore, so basic English words are not recognized. Perhaps we could blame television and the social media. Television does not encourage reading and the social media does not fault bad grammar and poor spelling.
The other day I was reading a text message and I could not understand from head to toe. There was ‘smh’ which I learnt meant shaking my head. The writer would have no problem here. There is no need to know to spell ‘shaking’. There are other abbreviations that represent sentences and this is what is fast replacing the English words that we use in conversation.
As an editor, I have actually seen reporters write that someone said, “I told u to go back to the police.” A very long time ago, one lecturer once said to me that language is changing, and I am living through the change. However, those changes have not made their way into standard written communication.
The people who wrote examinations and got those poor English grades must have been ardent followers of the social media. And the social media are not employing.
Guyana, however, goes a step further. It is introducing Portuguese in schools. The aim is to have Portuguese-speaking people living in Guyana. I thought that with the influx of Brazilians we would have had so many that by osmosis the entire nation would be speaking Portuguese. However, our educators want us to learn the language in the proper way. They want us to be able to spell and to write the language.
I would have thought that the resources would have gone to ensure that we speak proper English and thus become employable. When I was at school, the focus was on French and Spanish. I thought that Spanish made sense, because we happen to live on a continent where the overwhelming majority of the people speak Spanish.
But then again those Spanish-speaking people would always say that English should be taught as a second language. In Guyana, one school of thought is that English is indeed a second language, although with the preponderance of television and the like, one would have expected English to be the Mother language.
This school of thought says that the dialect we speak is the Mother language. If that is the case, how come many of us cannot read it?
So it is back to the situation where our young people must be provided with jobs. They are for the greater part very savvy when it comes to Information Technology. If they are, then they should know that they can use technology to enhance their learning, but they do not.
Some Government Ministers say that the projects being pursued by the government were intended to create hundreds of jobs for the young people. The Amaila Falls project is on hold, so there are no jobs there. The Marriott is supposed to be under construction but there is still no job there for Guyanese.
The airport expansion project should be creating jobs but it is not, at least not for young people who studied hard to write the CSEC. So Guyana may be continuing on a downward spiral. Last week, a study found that it has the lowest per capita income in the Caricom region. Some countries once considered poorer than Guyana had such high per capita incomes that one can now understand why their people are not as preoccupied with migrating as Guyanese are.
And the advantage of migrating may soon disappear. Guyana is heading for a blacklist that would see it having to keep its money, and those wishing to send money may find that they cannot. Perhaps all this is the result of the calamitous education system which cannot be resurrected by the social media.
THIS IDIOT TELLING GUYANA WE HAVE NO SAY IN THE 50% PROFIT SHARING AGREEMENT WE HAVE WITH EXXON.
Mar 28, 2024
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