Dear Editor,
Article 26 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) asserts that everyone has the right to education. Subsection 3 declares, “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”
The public schools offer their brand of education and most parents avail themselves of it. Some parents prefer different kinds of education (that are also approved by the Ministry of Education). They believe strongly enough to pay for their choice. Even though my brothers and I qualified for free places to attend the top public schools of our choice in the then colony, our parents had sufficient religious belief to pay for our education elsewhere. They paid their taxes and exercised their right as citizen parents. They were not taxed by the British Guiana government for their choice. They were not affluent, and we all had to make sacrifices, but we learnt to depend on the God we believed in.
The private school that I attended later became free for candidates like me. In 1976 such schools were fully taken over by the government. The original brand of education offered by that school continued for a while, but over the years the public school brand took over, and the great traditions and examples of earlier eras faded.
After the restoration of democracy in 1992, there arose again the possibility of parents choosing the kind of systematic education they could bestow on their children, and private schools lived again officially, but by no means easily. Now that choice still exists, but it is being made harder by at least 14%. If Guyana is a land of the free, as we sing so often in our National Anthem, why should this freedom to exercise a right enshrined in the UDHR be impeded?
The tax base that pays for public schools and teacher education has already been broadened in other taxes. Parents who pay for private education are already taxed for being able to afford it. If the government is claiming they are not collecting it and that, “As of 2016, there were fifty-four private educational institutions registered with the Guyana Revenue Authority, few of whom were tax compliant, including submission of yearly income and corporate tax returns”, then they must learn to fix it according to the law and constitution their predecessors imposed on us. Wasn’t there a ministry of governance and highly paid advisors appointed to tell them what is obvious to right-thinking citizens?
I should also not have to be the one to tell the Minister of Finance that money is the legally allowed currency of exchange used by the Guyanese society and that therefore any fiscal policy has social effects. It is like trying to say that raising the temperature (tax) in a closed system (society) will not increase the pressure (stress). Every engineer knows there could be a damaging explosion. Perhaps the social scientists can find a better analogy.
Yours faithfully,
Alfred Bhulai
