OP-ED: From Crisis to Catastrophe – How the PPP’s Education Failure is Killing Guyana’s Workforce; Mediocrity Institutionalized

Guyana’s critical sectors, from health to education to public infrastructure, are not suffering from staff shortages because of our population size. With 750,000 people, we should be able to train and staff our hospitals, schools, and public agencies. But we can’t. And the reason is painfully clear, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has presided over the intentional degradation of our education system for decades, resulting in the gross undereducation of more than half our nation’s children.

This isn’t speculation. It’s evidenced in the staggering dropout rates, the dismal national exam results, and the thousands of young people who leave school barely literate or numerate. These dropouts should have been our nurses, doctors, engineers, teachers, and civil servants. Instead, they become casualties of a failed system, and Guyana is left scrambling to fill the very roles they could have occupied.

In a desperate attempt to plug this gaping hole, the government rushed the expansion of the GOAL scholarship program, a move that seems more focused on optics than outcomes. Now, year after year, we’re witnessing cohorts of students, many of whom entered the program barely able to read or write, emerging with degrees from unaccredited or low-quality institutions, ready to serve in the country’s most vital professions.

Let that sink in. In a country already on its knees due to an education collapse, the PPP has fast-tracked the production of semi-literate “professionals” to manage our schools, treat our sick, and administer our public services. It’s a cruel joke with deadly consequences.

This is not just an education crisis, it’s a national security threat. When a nurse can’t read a prescription, or a teacher can’t construct a sentence, or a police officer can’t write a coherent report, lives are at stake. When mediocrity becomes institutionalized, incompetence becomes policy.

The PPP government continues to boast about economic growth driven by oil, yet refuses to confront the rot at the core of our human capital. They would rather inflate numbers, fabricate success stories, and parade diplomas than admit to the irreversible damage they’ve inflicted on an entire generation of Guyanese children.

The irony is unbearable: the very people who once deprived our children of a decent education are now handing them degrees like candy, with no regard for rigor, readiness, or real-world competence. This is not development. It is deception.

Guyana cannot be built on a foundation of false credentials and failing systems. It is time for a reckoning. We must stop pretending that the GOAL program, as currently implemented, is anything more than a smokescreen for a long-standing failure in leadership. The future of our nation depends not on how many certificates we hand out, but on how well we prepare our children to think, solve, serve, and lead.

And right now, we are failing—catastrophically.