It is easy to understand why Education Minister Priya Manickchand would not want the media to dwell on the fact that a survey conducted by her ministry indicates that just 32 per cent of our children between Grades One and Six are reading at their respective grade levels. The remaining 68 per cent fall below where they ought to be, though just how far below is unclear. It is not an uplifting statistic. In fact, it points to a considerable failure in a critical area of our education system, both the formal school system and the weakening of the long-established and, over time, highly successful regimen comprising parents, the National Library, borrowing clubs in municipal markets and community book clubs among others. Time was when school-age children read to their parents before going to bed, and friends engaged in lively conversations about current ‘reads’ and favourite authors. Those were the days too when Guyana was believed to have the highest literacy rate in the Caribbean.
That having been said we doubt that the Minister would deny that news of this nature is deserving of some measure of public contemplation since (and again we expect that the Minister would be the first to concede this) information of this nature is a matter of direct and even urgent national importance.
One might add, of course, that there is no need for the Minister to feel a burden of personal responsibility in this matter since the start of the reading decline long preceded her accession to office. A relevant question, however, is just how much has happened on her watch to roll back the problem.
The Minister has announced that her ministry intends to respond to the recent worrying revelations on reading deficiencies in the school system by implementing a five-year literacy programme. If we cannot but support workable remedial action we feel compelled to enquire as to whether the proposed five-year literacy enhancement programme is not a knee-jerk official response to what is perceived as a dire or at least deeply worrying circumstance. That, indeed, is precisely the manner in which ‘five-year programmes’ of one sort or another have often been applied here in Guyana – as palliatives designed to create what, not infrequently, is an entirely fallacious impression that one problem or another is receiving serious and structured attention; so that we hope that this time around the Minister does not mind if, going forward, this particular five-year programme is rolled out in a manner that allows stakeholders to track its progress at the levels of both implementation and outcomes.
We also need to be assured that the plan is not being envisaged as a sort of quick fix solution to a problem that has been festering for many years, and that it contains all of the critical institutional, human and financial resources without which, in our view, it will simply fall by the wayside.
What we already know, for example, is that the strengthening of the National Library regime across the country, the creation of reading corners in schools, more school libraries and simply giving children more books will not, in themselves, turn the situation around. As a retired primary school teacher remarked to this newspaper recently, “reading has gone out of style… we have to create an appetite for reading amongst children.”
Not only do we agree with her but we venture to suggest that what used to be our voracious appetite for reading has been progressively killed off and that home, school and the wider society must share the blame for this.
To take the schools first, it is worth wondering whether any sort of continual official evaluation of the existing primary school reading programme was being carried out over the years in order to determine both the thoroughness with which it is being implemented or whether the results of the survey are not, in fact, a wake-up call which should have come long ago.
One wonders too whether the Minister might not wish to hear from those teachers who continue to discreetly voice their frustrations about effort and reward and who, in some instances, have suggested that the reading programme may well have been a victim of that frustration. As an aside and based on this newspaper’s interaction with teachers just last week on the matter of the effective implementation of the reading programme (and perhaps other programmes as well in state schools) we respectfully submit (not for the first time) for the Minister’s and the government’s attention that unless remedial and corrective measures to perceived problems in the education sector take particular account of the need to implement significantly enhanced training and incentivization regimes for teachers, measures like the ministry’s five-year literacy programme will continue to be on a hiding to nowhere.
Setting aside the formal school system, what sustained our high levels of reading proficiency in previous years was a largely informal but effective stakeholder programme that embraced teachers, parents and a far from perfect National Library system. The children read as a routine in the school curriculum and afterwards many of them read to their parents at home. Membership of a library was encouraged, nay, enforced by teachers and parents alike. Young people, meanwhile discussed their current reading preoccupations and their favourite authors. In those days, too, there were functioning school libraries and ‘reading clubs’ run as small commercial enterprises in municipal markets. Of course, up to not too many years ago reading had not been required to compete with a proliferation of information technology which, admittedly, has all but swept the passion for reading among young people aside.
Standards of reading declined because the aforementioned ‘agreement’ among stakeholders that had sustained those standards simply fell apart under the challenge of less worthwhile competing distractions and the state school system, with all of its deficiencies, was simply unable to draw a line in the sand.
On its own, the Ministry of Education’s five-year remedial reading programme will not stop the rot. Reading, whether as a creative exercise or as a vehicle for the pursuit of knowledge, can only thrive in a nurturing environment.
We therefore believe that the Minister of Education would do well to hitch the sails of her ministry’s five-year literacy to the tried and proven mast of the informal stakeholder reading culture that once used to be the driving force behind a previously proud national reading tradition. Otherwise, five years can pass quickly with nothing to show for it.
