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Many years ago I was told that English was my mother tongue. And indeed it was. The vernacular or Creolese was frowned on. As a boy unless one was with relatives or close friends, one had to speak the English language. Creolese was for the lower classes of people. There weren’t so many secondary schools but Guyanese were so good that they were considered the most educated in the Caribbean.
There was this incident when I was at Primary School. The head teacher sent me to call a boy. I did, but the boy never responded to the head teacher’s request. When the head teacher caught up with him the boy denied ever receiving a message from me. There I stood asking the boy, “Didn’t I told you that sir was calling you?” I immediately became the centre of the head teacher’s attention.
The school was St Jude’s Anglican at Blankenburg, West Coast Demerara. The head teacher was Wilfred George, long deceased. He turned to me and queried, “Didn’t I told?” After more than sixty years I have not forgotten that lesson. It was just a question. One day I happened to be in St Margaret’s Primary on Camp Street. In the class, and it was a lower primary class, there was this teacher asking, “How many hands do a clock has?”
Years later, I was made to realise that my native language was Creolese which was indeed a language with a structure like any established language. It was the language that we learnt at our mother’s knee. But it was English that we used extensively.
We, the older folks, became proficient because we read extensively. We developed a very wide vocabulary. To this day there are some words that I cannot use before some students and if I do, I have to explain.
Reading is not a preferred exercise. There were bookstores in Guyana selling numerous works. They have all but disappeared. Newspaper circulation is down because readership has declined. With that decline has come the decline in proficiency in the English language.
There was also a decline in an ability to reason. Experiences became limited because through reading one shared many vicarious experiences. These thoughts came to mind when I noticed the fail grades at the external examinations. Even at the highest levels more than sixty per cent of our students fail English.
There was this English woman who once told me that I had a good tongue in my head. I was in the tube—called subway in North America—and was asking for directions. I queried whether I could get lost. The woman replied in the negative. Then she made that statement.
It could be argued that the education system should be geared to prepare students for life in their country. If so, then failing English would not be considered a big thing. However, Guyana is not an island. Guyanese in parts of the United States, especially in Queens, New York, have pushed the police to use interpreters when interviewing our people.
The recent CXC results show a further decline in passes in English. It means that the newer crop of students is getting worse. That could be the result of putting the least experienced teachers to teach lower school. And so it is that there is bad grammar in the newspapers and on radio and on television. But worse. If some of these students are to pursue further studies overseas many would be at a disadvantage.
Of course, being resilient, they will take to reading so much more than when they were in Guyana. They will be forced to burn the midnight oil. There is one issue that I had decided to ignore but sometimes it is difficult to let some things pass. There was this devotion by Kwame McCoy to my last column. For starters it highlighted the Minister’s grasp of the English language. As a Minister I suppose he can get away with that. Bona fide are two words and spelt this way.
There are more but I am not going to teach him. On Friday, Minister Collin Croal told the National Assembly that the government never said that the people at Cane View, Mocha Arcadia, were in the path of Heroes Highway. Kwame was in the House. In his political rant he wrote, “Each of the affected persons who were squatting in the path of the highway, specifically along the lands that would envelop the highway which were designated as part of a new commercial corridor…”
Are the commercial buyers being asked to pay what the government offered the affected people? That would be the market value. Kwame’s objection was to the headline that proclaimed that the government wanted to destroy black people. I cannot help but wonder at the reluctance of President Irfaan Ali to confirm the Chancellor and the Chief Justice despite getting the support of the Opposition.
I also recall when the Judicial Service Commission appointed James Bovell-Drakes a judge, the government headed by Bharrat Jagdeo, refused to confirm the appointment. It took the senior jurists, among them the late Rex McKay, to stage a protest and threaten to mount even more.
Why was the contract for relaying the sewage lines to accommodate the Marriott taken away from Courtney Benn Contracting Services? Jagdeo’s excuse was that Guyana lacked the skills to do so. But Guyanese have been laying pipelines since then. I will not go on.
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