The announcement last week that the Ministry of Education has commissioned a Sixth Form at the Anna Regina Multilateral School that will roll out a curriculum designed to provide access to the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) is good news if only because it comes at a time when the country’s education system has had to endure a torrid time purely to deliver an acceptable day-to-day curriculum in the face of a coronavirus pandemic that has driven a devastating high speed train through it. The announcement comes against the backdrop of outpourings of doom and gloom in the matter of just what will be the longer-term fate of the various tiers of school-age children who have either not had the experience of being in a learning setting for the better part of two years or the even younger ones who have never in their lives been exposed to formal learning.
One assumes, of course, that the launch of the CAPE programme at the Anna Regina Multilateral School was preceded by meticulous planning, painstaking research, and a clear understanding of the tools, teaching tools and otherwise, that are needed to effectively deliver the CAPE curriculum. One makes this point conscious of the disease of window-dressing with which our behavioural culture is stricken. Here, one refers to our propensity for creating entirely misleading façades that were nothing but grandiose illusions in the first place. Here, of course, one must point out that it is the sustained high standards which the students of Anna Regina Multilateral have set themselves and the excellent work put in by their parents and teachers that have made the case for the CAPE curriculum.
Part of the significance of the installation of CAPE in Region Two is that, to some extent, it removes the age-old ‘understanding’ that the highest levels of secondary education can only be accessed by children who reside in Region Four, in close proximity to what we loosely describe as ‘the best schools.’ There are, as well, the exceptions of the particularly ambitious children from other regions who worked hard enough in their own regions during their pre-secondary years to access what is still widely believed to be the best secondary education that the country has to offer.
Information contained in a story that appear-ed in the Stabroek News of last Saturday suggests that the talk about creating a curriculum infrastructure that could accommodate CAPE had been on the cards for some while. If this is indeed the case it suggests that for some time now the Anna Regina Multilateral School has been, through the consistency of its academic ‘returns deriving from the CXC examination, making a persuasive case for a CAPE curriculum. This speaks not just to the academic prowess of the students but also to the professionalism of their teachers who, going forward, are going to have to raise their game even further to prepare their charges for the CAPE challenge. One makes this point about the teachers mindful of the fact that at the wider national level the contribution which our teachers make to what, in effect, is the future of our country is sadly lacking the recognition it deserves, sometimes at the highest levels of our country. The reality is, however much we may seek to deny it, that when comparisons are made amongst the various categories of our professionals, teachers are unacceptably low on the food chain, denied both the material reward and the professional recognition that they deserve. In those circumstances, the contributions of the teachers at Anna Regina Multilateral and various other schools across the country must surely derive from a sense of mission that is worthy of the highest praise.
It is, of course, in the nature of this country’s political culture that occurrences like the Anna Regina CAPE accomplishment are seized upon and bandied around as if they were the outcomes of insightful political brain waves. What the school has achieved, one feels, derives from the consistency of the students’ excellence coupled with the high standard of inspiration and curriculum delivery which the teachers have offered their charges. We wish them well.
