Saying the public education system “is not truly free,” Education Minister Dr Rupert Roopnaraine hopes to do away with the need for extra lessons that can cost parents hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.
“My own feeling is that we have to ensure the kind of experience in the classroom that makes extra lessons a thing of the past,” Roopnaraine told Stabroek News in a recent interview.
He shared his disgust with reports he received of teachers who were not teaching in school so as to create a demand for the extra lessons they offer. “There is something really appalling about… teachers who are supposed to be teaching in the classroom, [not teaching] … then [they] go to some bottom house and teach exactly what they should’ve been teaching in the classroom and get paid for it,” Roopnaraine said, while adding that the practice “has to stop.”
The question of extra lessons has been an ongoing issue for the Ministry of Education over several administrations. In 2008, then PPP/C minister of education Shaik Baksh declared that teachers would be prohibited from giving extra lessons in classrooms, once it was for pay.
