Dear Editor,
Now that the annual CSEC and CAPE results are public, and official and personal celebrations fill the atmosphere, I take yet another peek into what lifts and lets down.
Before moving ahead, congratulations are offered to those who focussed and were dedicated, and now reap the returns. For them, preparations, engagements, and commitments occupied, almost exclusively, most of their young lives, toward a single-minded purpose: exam success. It is here, deserving, and but the first nervous (or swaggering), serious (or pretending), and conscientious (or scorning) test of many to come in life’s challenging journeys. The others will be more demanding. As to the many below the radar, who didn’t make the grade(s), I ask these questions: How many? Where from? Where to?
In a country brimming with oil, they may be consigned to pushing wheelbarrows (or other products); to pushing the envelope of the unthinkable and the unsettling. What else is there for them? What kinds of business activity? What other fallback (rewarding) options? What choices left, when the next rungs in the ladder cannot be scaled? Not much left, but fetching, following, and fooling with felonies, for the weak, the gullible, and the willing.
If because of aptitude or circumstances, so many have to be left behind, then only a palpable grimness waits. Both for them and for society. The temptations still flourish richly; the glamorous and glittering stories stand out in a poor, wretched place with not much to offer. At the rate of political and racial progress, and in view of the old histories and new contexts of both, the oil does not appear as if it will remedy anything. On the contrary, it has already exacerbated emotions, tensions, and divisions. The sum of youth education from birth has been the Spartan indoctrination and fanaticism of: put your ‘X’ there, and only there.
So where does this leave the ones who came up short? Like runners collapsed by the wayside? To be ignored and salvaged (perhaps) when the cheering and self-congratulations have subsided? Because if they can’t get past CSEC, then what does that say of them? Of the system? And, remember from earlier, of aptitude and circumstances?
Editor, I share the following. First, without taking away anything from anyone, how does anyone cover a score of subjects at any level? At the edges only? Superficially only? What is the extent of any substantive learning, if for the sharply gifted (and devoted) ones, the exercises contract to this: swallowing wholesale; cramming fulltime; and upchucking compulsively?
Second, I have problems putting my mind around clock management for 20 subjects today, when less than a dozen was the absolute maximum from a more familiar era. When that same number taxed even the superstars and go-getters. How many study hours could be realistically set aside for 14, or 16, or higher numbers of subjects? Even as I account for certain subjects – favourites, pushovers and giveaways, and those for which there are special attributes – the reality is that of a shrunk clock and compressed calendar. Now this brings me to the undesired.
Something is emerging from the singular efforts of the heralded. Because, next, I must question the degree of difficulty of the testing and challenging. I have seen them for years, and they left in a poor place: simplistic; frail; enfeebling. I venture, even frivolous for Fifth formers. As an aside, some dedicated Fourth formers sit and succeed at the so-called harder ones, like Maths and English. Further, give Third formers the syllabus, and the exceptional can trample over CSEC fare. And that is why there is so much shriveling when the comparatively demanding world of CAPE is tried.
Fourth, if the degree of inquiry for CSEC enables routinely well over a dozen subjects to be successfully attempted, then what does that reveal about those who fall apart before the weight of five or six subjects? Meaning, that if the testing is so lacking in caliber and depth, how unready and nonfunctional for society are those many, who can’t get past even this? I submit that the CSEC standard is the basic of the basic with regards to academic requirements. It does not take any learning to appreciate that this is trouble.
Fifth, if this is what, for the most part, travels to the university level, then what hope there? What hope, despite later bloomers, greater gravity of personal thinking? What hope for a society almost sure-to-be the richest (per capita) on the face of the earth? Who is going to carry whom? How much is there to carry them? And, I offer this: due consideration given to the politically craven and unscrupulous, some pittance in some form should trickledown to the empty-handed and empty-headed, what then? Will calculating politicians have created an irreversible dependency syndrome? Will the addicted to free money (however it flushes downward) be enslaved helplessly to lifelong lingering at the margins?
Last, I can envision mainly foreigners (neighbours, fortune hunters, a corporate criminal class) coming to exploit the oil, exploit the weaknesses, and exploit the divisions. This oil may be the worst thing that happened to Guyana. Both old and young are lost? Where are the truly wise?
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
