· The Ultimate Disrespect! MOE Polices Teachers with Biometrics While Ignoring Pleas for Living Wages

It is with a profound sense of disgust and disillusionment that we witness the Ministry of Education, under the leadership of Minister Sonia Parag, roll out its latest instrument of control; a biometric attendance system to “track teacher presence.” This initiative is breathtakingly hypocritical considering the government’s unwillingness to implement biometrics in the elections process. The MOE’s move is the pinnacle of a cruel and cynical administrative philosophy that polices the educators it refuses to empower, trust, or pay.

The staggering hypocrisy is the first point of condemnation. This government, which refuses to implement biometric verification to secure the sanctity of our national votes, the very foundation of our democracy, suddenly finds unwavering faith in biometric technology when it serves to monitor and discipline teachers. Clearly biometrics are not for ensuring your democratic rights, but for enforcing your subservience. Your fingerprint is not trusted to choose a government, but it is mandated to prove your punctuality.

Minister Parag’s saccharine appeal to “compassion and empathy” and her nostalgia for her own teachers ring hollow against the brutal reality her ministry is creating. Do not fall for Sonia’s “compassion”; this move is all about control. While the ministry tightens the screws with school grading, rankings, and now biometric surveillance, it simultaneously offloads its own responsibilities. Teachers are commanded to use AI to improve lessons without training, certification, or additional compensation. Teachers  are to perform technological miracles with zero support, while being treated like delinquent factory workers, forced to clock in and out.

All of this unfolds against the backdrop of the most damning indictment, teachers in Guyana endure the lowest salaries in the Caribbean region. Instead of a credible, respectful, and urgent plan to remedy this disgrace, the PPP government’s policy is to invest in digital systems to police those it underpays. Teachers are not respected as professionals; they are managed as suspects. The “real-time attendance data” the ministry craves is a substitute for the real-time respect, support, and remuneration it withholds.

The Minister speaks of “investing in the education sector,” yet the PPP’s legacy is one of systemic underinvestment in people. Poverty is rampant, engineered by policies that enrich a connected few while poor families struggle to afford books, internet, and the basic experiences that enable learning. The government’s answer is not to lift these burdens, but to track the teachers who struggle to perform miracles within the barren landscape the PPP has created. This biometric system is a costly, high-tech scapegoat, designed to shift the blame for systemic failure onto the shoulders of the frontline workforce.

Minister Parag is setting herself up for a failure more spectacular than that of her predecessor, Priya Manickchand, who presided over the massive undereducation of a generation. This path is worse. It adds a layer of technological authoritarianism to the same core neglect. The approach is not to diagnose and cure the disease; the poverty, the lack of resources, the demoralized profession, but to obsessively monitor the symptoms.

To the teachers of Guyana, this system is a badge of dishonor crafted by a ministry that does not trust you, does not value you, and does not pay you. It is a monument to failed priorities. The government’s vision for education is clear,  a classroom where every teacher’s fingerprint is logged while every child’s potential is locked out by poverty, and where the state’s eye is always on the clock, but never, ever on the check.

This will not improve education. It will only deepen the rift, accelerate the brain drain, and document in excruciating, real-time detail how a great profession is being brought to its knees by a government that prefers digital policing over dignified partnership. The failure will be recorded, Minister Parag, but not by your biometric machines. It will be recorded in the continued exodus of talent, in the quiet desperation of classrooms, and in the historical judgment of an administration that watched education burn while it busied itself counting the ashes.