About two years ago the Minister of Education Nicolette Henry was reported to have said, ‘The Ministry of Education will be moving to review a 20-year-old school curriculum, in an effort to re-energise the education sector here. … Particular focus will be placed on English and Mathematics, subject areas the education system has been struggling with over time. Special focus will also be placed on the inclusion of the use of technology to aid teaching and learning’ (CH: 2/09/2017). I let it pass although I thought that her conceptualization of the nature of curriculum reform and thus about the time span she mentioned was incorrect.
Either because nothing was said on that occasion or we have different understandings when we speak of curriculum review, on 27/03/2019, the Department of Public Information (DPI) in one of its press releases went substantially further and claimed that the ‘nationwide curriculum reform … process … has not been undertaken since 1976.’ It also reported that the project coordinator of the Guyana Education Sector Improvement Project (GESIP), following in the footsteps of the minister, stated, ‘We cannot in earnest be trying to train children for the 21st century if the curriculum that we are using is two decades old because then you are not equipping children with modern skills for the world that they’re going to be facing.’ There appeared to be some dissonance between the two positions in this paragraph about the last reform effort, but it appeared to me that the distance between the two is so large and the former so absurd that there must be a mistake.
