Many years ago I was a teacher. In fact, that was my first job. It started way back in 1966. I entered the Government Teachers Training College in 1967 majoring in Chemistry and Physics. From time to time I was required to teach Mathematics when the teachers were not there.
It was an exciting period in my life. It took at least three years to prepare children for the external examinations. I taught at the Bartica Government Secondary School, the only Grade B Secondary School to prepare and secure passes in Physics and Chemistry at the GCE O’ Levels to this day.
Grade B Schools were expected to prepare children for Integrated Sciences.
In those days, children wrote the General Certificate Examinations commonly referred to as GCE.
This year there were praises for those children who did remarkably well at the Caribbean Secondary Examinations and CAPE. These examinations have replaced the GCE O’ Levels and A’ Levels.
I saw some Facebook posts, one by Education Minister Priya Manickchand. I merely posted whether credit should not go to the Coalition. I got no answer.
When the Coalition came to office in 2015 there was a focus on the education system. I am not going to go into the figures that highlighted how poorly Guyana was performing when compared to the other Caribbean territories. This year Guyana was the best-performing country.
The results of these recent examinations reflected the four years of preparation under a modified and upgraded school system.
However, there was no mention of this. Instead, there was talk about the Coalition doing nothing during its term in office.
Then I saw the performance by the children at the Grade Six Assessment Examinations. Way back in the 1990s when Wilfred Success was a teacher at West Ruimveldt Primary School he secured some astounding results. That school secured six children in the top ten.
The noise was deafening. Most of the people in the country claimed that Wilfred Success cheated; that he had procured the examination papers in advance and had drilled the children.
The reality is that he continued to produce top-performing children to the point that parents now seek him out. He has opened his private school. This year, again he got astonishing results. Only this time nobody claimed that he had cheated. He got four in the top ten and would be sending nearly two dozen children to Queen’s College.
Indeed, there is the maxim that if the children have not learned, the teachers have not taught. Wilfred Success is a teacher and he has employed other teachers.
The public schools did the best they could, bearing in mind that during this pandemic many parents, ordinary people, could not afford computers, did not have access to the internet and therefore could not get their children to attend online classes.
There were 13,000 who wrote the exams. No more than 1,300 would go on to good secondary schools.
Again, we should understand that many of the parents are not academically inclined so they did not give their children the needed attention and supervision. But many of these children did well under the circumstances. They deserve congratulations.
And there were some other things that caused raised eyebrows. Former Assistant Commissioner Paul Slowe was out of the country when SOCU laid charges for some incidents dating back to 2019. Heaven knows why those charges have surfaced only now.
However, while Slowe was doing his job with the West Indies Cricket Board the charges were laid but not read to him. By way of a summons sent to Attorney at Law Nigel Hughes last week, he was informed that he needed to attend court. And that he did.
When he was in the court four SOCU ranks decided that they should arrest him. If a man is in court to answer charges that have to be read to him and there was no arrest warrant, on what ground can he be arrested?
The truth is that the authorities wanted to have him appear in court with handcuffs and shackles for no other reason than to embarrass him.
He knows his rights and he resisted, causing the ranks to assault him. There have been criticisms of this episode from lawyers and former magistrates. There has been total silence from the Attorney General.
This episode lends support to the widely held belief that the government is using the police to harass and to embarrass those who dare to comment on its wrongdoings.
It suspended the Police Service Commission as a means of preparing its own list of police promotions. Then the Attorney General files to the court for the move by the Police Service Commission to challenge the government’s refusal to recognize the PSC list of promotions, be struck out because the commission has been suspended by the government. He argues that there is no commission to represent the action.
We’ll see where that argument goes.
The other thing that bothered many people was the fact that a man, Colin Bailey, spent almost six years in jail on a murder charge when the police had no evidence to hold him.
He was freed by the judge who questioned the fact that the matter reached the high court although there was no evidence against Colin Bailey.
And while in jail, Bailey suffered a heart attack and contracted COVID.
I have approached the DPP to explain how such a thing could happen. There were too many checks and balances. I am awaiting her response.
