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Jun 22, 2014 News
Countryman – Stories about life, in and out of Guyana, from a Guyanese perspective
By Dennis A. Nichols
My professional working experience over the years has been diverse; seven jobs over a ‘career’ that started at the age of
16, including apprentice electrician, journalist and National Insurance (NIS) Inspector. Sometimes my choice of occupation was a matter of expediency as I observed my family growing much too rapidly for my income.
Teaching however, was the one job I kept coming back to, even after two resignations and a premature retirement. Why? It couldn’t be for the money, so I figured it was simply that I loved children and the enigma of childhood. And one of the reasons I entered the profession in the first place was that I felt reasonably comfortable with the education system then.
I was taught, and learnt, the old school way, with the threat of my headmaster-father’s wild cane, and later that of my QC headmaster, always hovering somewhere between my consciousness and playfulness. I started out teaching with a similar mindset in 1976, but soon found out, to my bewilderment, that I was not my father, that the child behavioural studies I was exposed to at C.P.C.E. were practically demonstrated in the classroom, and that try as I might, I couldn’t help befriending my charges, even as old school discipline clashed with modern day educational psychology.
This shift in the dynamics of teaching and learning was extended into a bittersweet experience for me, and I’m certain for many other teachers, who try with all sincerity and commitment, to navigate a way between that old-school discipline, modern-day child psychology and an increasingly permissive classroom environment. The vernacular Guyanese adage, ‘Dis time na laang time’ impressed itself with greater definition as I continued to teach, at the primary, all-age, and secondary levels at a dozen schools in Guyana, The Bahamas and, for a short time, in the United States.
In my last article I made reference to two basic Reading texts that were used during my parents’ days and my own early childhood – The Royal Readers and Nelson West Indian Readers – both of which I later concluded were to some extent irrelevant to our Caribbean persona. Yet, for all their irrelevance and colonial sentimentality, they were part of a teaching and learning ethic in schools that nurtured a discipline which helped produce some of Guyana’s greatest and most perceptive minds including Sir Lionel Luckhoo, Justice Desiree Bernard, Forbes Burnham, Sir Shridath Ramphal and Dr. Walter Rodney.
In The Bahamas, with its disproportionate American influence, it was another story, at least in the government schools where I taught. At my first school, Rum Cay All-Age, there were a few (very few) books written by Bahamian and Caribbean authors that could have been considered suitable reading and instruction material for the 16 students (spanning nine grades)my wife and I taught. But there were ‘tons’ of American-authored books, many of them gifts from US-based homeowners and visitors to this sparsely-populated cay in the middle of the archipelago. Due maybe in part to the dearth of relevant reading material, some children were understandably insular in their general outlook, leading to some interesting and amusing interaction with expatriate teachers.
For example, most of the students there thought that Miami was a part of The Bahamas, and why not? Bahamians travel to that U.S. city on an almost daily basis, often just to shop, sometimes returning the same day or the next. As I noted in an earlier article, some of them refused to believe that Guyana was bigger than their 30 square-mile island, or that their ancestors were African slaves; they wouldn’t take my word for it. That’s what a lack of culturally-relevant reading material and that curious mixture of British colonial government and a historically American-influenced lifestyle can do to malleable young minds.
Add to this the increasingly permissive classroom environment I mentioned earlier, the students’ shift from book reading to internet-gleaned information and you enter into a ‘brave new world’ of modern day literacy, functional or otherwise, that allows 12th graders to graduate in ceremonial extravagance with a GPA of under 2.00. Not having taught in Guyana since 1996, I’m not in a position to comment with any sort of depth on what now obtains here literacy-wise, except to say that many of the shortcomings I observed in The Bahamas seem to have crept into our government schools.
In terms of school discipline, student behaviour, and teacher-student interaction generally, both Guyana (from what I remember) and The Bahamas appear to have turned an unpredictable corner since the dawn of the 21st century, with what appears to be a dramatic increase in school and classroom violence involving alcohol, drugs, knives and occasionally, guns. Some students admit as much. Once a Grade 8 student confided in me when I enquired about his obvious lethargy, “Is rum sir, is de rum”. Much of this behaviour it is believed stems from dysfunctional, often single-parent, homes, poverty, and low self-esteem, the last two being problems not easily recognized in The Bahamas with its outward appearance of prosperity.
For better or worse Guyana, like The Bahamas, has embraced modern education methods framed around child-centred teaching that rightly provides for the psychological well-being of our children, maybe less so than that of our teachers. One of the consequences appears to be that children are increasingly becoming less-restrained in the expression of their egos and individualism, while teachers suffer increasingly from the effects of decreased authority and increased stress levels, compounded by inadequate remuneration.
So, do we need to revert to old school education in this new age techno world? Will going back to imperialist literature and colonial-style discipline do the trick? Probably not. For starters you’d have to do away with the internet and the array of electronic gadgets that are so much a part of our children’s everyday lives. And what about putting corporal punishment back in the hands of the teachers? The truth, as I see it, is that we are caught in an inexorable grind of change and human evolution. Towards what, God only knows, but it will obviously influence our children’s education, and their future.
Finally, regardless of how out-of-control today’s schoolchildren appear, it may well be a matter of perception coloured by the nature of our own reality as adults. (Look at the paradox of politics in our so-called civil society) My teaching/learning experiences with children over time, and the friendships I forged with them regardless of their temperament, have made me wary of educational dogma, and overly-structured teaching. In the final analysis, children are indeed children. I know. In addition to the hundreds I taught over the years, I helped raise and educate seven of my own.
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