Our editorial focus on the nexus between technology and development in this week’s issue was deliberate. Apart from reminding (not necessarily informing but reminding, given the fact that information of this nature is, these days, readily available through the electronic media) our readers, including our policy-makers of the grim reality that except our overall education system begins to favour, much more generously, a science and technology bent, we are, as a developing country, bound to fall further and further behind, we also seek to make a direct appeal to the private sector to pick up the pace, so to speak, insofar as technology-related advocacy is concerned. Frankly, we do not believe that enough is being done by the private sector in this area.
What we envisage is that at the levels of both the public and private sectors, the emergence of what one might call the ‘oil and gas agenda’ would have created a greater awareness of the need to raise our science and technology ‘game’ as far as public as well as sector-specific education is concerned, even though evidence that this is underway is not particularly apparent at this time.
Part of our editorial spread this week has to do with what is now the indispensable role that technology applications are playing in production and productivity in the agricultural sector. Indeed, one of the points made in our coverage has to do with the fact that the application of a greater technological focus to agriculture, globally, has to do with the challenge associated with feeding a population that continues to increase at a rapid rate given the fact that the contemporary farming methods, particularly in developing countries, are manifestly failing to keep pace with population growth and that as far as staving off hunger in poor countries is concerned, we are faced with a serious deficit.
An assessment of this kind cannot, of course, be undertaken without at least a cursory glance at how Guyana is coping in a world where the nexus between human development and technological development is becoming increasingly apparent. Here, there is the widespread view that viewed from a global perspective we are decidedly behind specifically in the area of science and technology as part of the schools’ curriculum, a critical concern here being that it is not apparent that our teachers in training are being prepared for a technology-oriented classroom experience.
Frankly, it makes little sense in starting a debate on technology as a developmental tool – in terms of the role it can play in the country’s social and economic transformation – except we can begin by asking ourselves (and affording ourselves a satisfactory answer) as to whether we are, at this stage, placing emphasis on the acquisition of the teaching tools – teachers being an indispensable part of those tools – to deliver a technology-centred education. Frankly, one can think of no more important an item for the contemporary curriculum change agenda (which, it seems, is part of the Ministry of Education’s agenda at this time) than how to develop and roll out a science and technology curriculum as part of the broader schools’ curriculum.
It is the same with the agriculture sector, which while appearing to be somewhat ahead of the education sector in terms of the application of science and technology in farm management and monitoring are concerned, is still way ‘off the pace’ when compared with many countries in the developing world and all of those in the developed world. The reality is that these days, technology-driven agriculture is not merely limited to the aerial monitoring of crops by drones, it has extended into technology-driven monitoring, managing, enhancing and corrective processes in which technology plays an overarching and directly intervening role, reduce the farmer’s role to simply responding to directives and instructions derived from computer-driven data.
It hardly need be said that technological development is dependent on cost considerations and on the availability of the requisite expertise to roll out the technology required to make the change. Part of the reason for reminders of this nature, however, is the feeling one sometimes gets – and here this applies as much to the public as the private sector – that the proclivity to debate issues of this nature to death often outweighs the will to move in the direction of timely implementation. The argument that is beginning to knock on the doors of countries like Guyana is that we continue to pursue these debates and discourses without any real transformative action to our own longer-term detriment.
