UG solution to literacy crisis

Facing our society’s vice-grip of gross illiteracy, with the Education Ministry failing to install a sound literacy strategy, citizens must confront our social decay before the rot becomes unworkable.

Our tertiary schools, with the University of Guyana leading the way, must step up and take leadership. We see the Government and Minister of Education passive and inactive where our literacy development is concerned.

What’s our response?

20130606shaunOur fall into an illiterate society happens gradually, like the proverbial frog in the heating water. So the emergency, lacking the urgency of a natural disaster, moves us not. We take no action. We let things slide slowly, our minds falling into disrepair in the quiet darkness of a Government that disregards literacy, while loving the State’s holdings of glittering real estate, those bright-painted school buildings, where questionable characters, of questionable construction knowledge, become rich with questionable State “contracts”.

If we do not care for every child in this land, future generations will blame us for their social plight. In fact, this generation now turning to adulthood already faces severe setbacks. Wide swathes of our communities all across this nation lack the social life skills necessary for fruitful living.

Despite the “no child left behind” mandate, the young of Linden, Albouystown, Black Bush Polder, Canje, Crabwood Creek, many hinterland communities, and across many Berbice and Essequibo villages, stare at a future of dismal prospects.

Where could we make a difference?

Despite the poor state of the University of Guyana, it stands as a possible solution.

Students studying for their first and second degrees offer an outstanding opportunity to the nation.

Our other post-secondary training schools, like the Teachers’ Training College, the Nursing School, technical and vocational schools such as the Cyril Potter College, all offer platforms for a solution to this shocking emergency we face in this 21st century.

The students who enrol at our University would best serve the nation with leadership in the literacy fight.

Granted that we harbour a Minister, and Government, and an Education system bureaucracy, that apparently care so little about literacy, we the citizens must take on the task.

In a society like ours, a national University becomes an optimal human resource asset of unimaginable value.

We could launch Adult Education classes in school buildings in the evenings across this land, teaching citizens essential life skills, providing professional development training, and offering life knowledge management programmes.

Such Adult Education classes could incorporate lessons on healthy living, entrepreneurship, social values and literacy. We thus would equip the individual Guyanese for successful living, eradicating many social ills now plaguing communities all across the land.

Successful in developed nations, these ideas work. And such a strategy outline exists, so it’s not like if we did not have access to this kind of information.

The Government knows what to do, but for some strange and inexplicable reason, refuses to tackle our most severe crisis. Our lack of skills, our handicap of not cultivating a fully literate population, and the absence of a national pool of human resource assets, leave us in a developmental quandary.

No wonder the Marriott Hotel owners resorted to foreign workers to construct the modern building.

Our efficiency, skills level and work ethics leave much to be desired. These come under the portfolio of the Minister of Education, especially with the lackadaisical leadership at the Ministry of Youth and Culture, which has devastated our national sport, cricket.

Since we cannot only point out problems, however, but must also offer solutions, we want to look around for how we could solve the crisis despite Government’s crass lack of action.

The University of Guyana is our beacon of light. But, again, we cannot look to the leadership of the institution, or the Student Association, both of which show signs of incompetence. We instead look to the students to organize small groups of caring Guyanese, who could adopt villages and communities and streets, and engage residents in literacy programmes.

Out of the University, we could develop a scenario where the other technical and vocational schools could see their students reach out in community outreach programmes, maybe as practicum or volunteer community service that gets credited to academic performance.

So many institutions in this country fail where the sad state of our literacy is concerned: the Private Sector Commission, playing politics for its own profit; the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association; trade unions; churches; NGO’s; women’s groups; political parties; the Government; Parliament. No one seems to care about this crisis. Despite knowing the sad state of our national skills pool, no one cares.

We should constitute an emergency Parliamentary committee looking into the state of our national skills pool. Instead, no one cares. No one does anything. No one takes into consideration the child, the young people, falling into the illiteracy quicksand, tumbling through the widening cracks of our social fabric.

Unemployment and under-employment across this land is critical in many outlying communities.

We started out the journey of building this nation with such zeal and success. In the University of Guyana, which Dr Cheddi Jagan launched in the 1960’s, in the free universal education system of Forbes Burnham, in our Medical School and Nursing College and network of technical and vocational training institutions, we built the best groundwork we could have hoped for.

Yet, in the last two decades, we saw the collapse of our once-lofty stance as a highly literate society.

This alone should cause this Government to hang its head in utter shame.

Yet, we could halt the rot now, through the University of Guyana, Dr Jagan’s brainchild.

In a crisis we look around for available tools that we could employ to make the difference, to plug the breach.

The tool to solve our literacy crisis comes in the form of the students of our national University.

Caring UG students, reaching into the inner recesses of our most disadvantaged social quagmires, our rotting communities, and extending the University’s being into the soul of the nation, would perform an incredibly humane act of compassion and kindness, in working to solve our literacy crisis.