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Aug 14, 2014 News
In light of the fact that the delivery of education at the level of schools is deliberately geared towards the production of leaders, Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand on Tuesday said, that she is not opposed to students opting to write an increased number of subjects at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination.
Writing a wide variety of subjects the Minister intimated, could in fact, help to ensure that students are thoroughly prepared for the leadership capacity they are expected to embrace later in life.
The Minister’s comments on the matter were forthcoming even as she addressed a forum to announce the results of CSEC and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination at the Kingston, Georgetown, National Centre for Education Resource Development (NCERD), on Tuesday.
Over the years, students have been gravitating to more subject areas, some even writing as many as 20 at CSEC, this year being no exception.
But is the quality of a student determined by the number of subjects they write? The Minister in speaking to this query from this publication said that there are students who do few subjects “but it’s just not a challenge. They are excellent, they are good and so they feel they need to do wide subject entries as possible.”
However, the matriculation rate recommended by the Ministry of Education is five CSEC subjects including Mathematics and English. According to the Minister, who herself wrote seven subjects, “We encourage students to write five to eight subjects.”
And even if the parents of these students do not have the wherewithal to pay their examination fees, Minister Manickchand informed that Government provides millions of dollars in subsidy for just this purpose.
However, she asserted that a student choosing to access the subsidy facility must prove that they are competent to write the number of subjects they have opted for.
And based on the results that the Ministry has been seeing in recent years, Minister Manickchand amplified that “the students who have been writing the many subjects have been doing fantastically well.”
“Why would we want to limit them when they have that capacity?” questioned the Minister. She further amplified her conviction that “in any collection of human beings you will find those who are extremely good, those who can write many (subjects) and those who want to write many…”
She continued her deliberations giving emphasis to the fact that Guyana is a country that offers its people, students included, choices that they can easily work with. “The beauty about life is that we have those choices and we live in a country that promotes choices, that promotes the ability to choose what parents and students together with their teachers will sit down and decide what they (students) want to do,” asserted the Education Minister.
As such the Minister in speaking to the ‘increased subjects’ phenomenon, shared her conviction that “…an all-round student is much more than an academic student, that’s why our school programmes are designed to put out (produce) leaders.”
“Leaders as you know are more than just academically good, they can represent their views, not only hold one. They can conceive of an idea and also prosecute and represent that idea and so we are pushing for more rounded students,” informed Minister Manickchand.
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