Rapid economic expansion and unprecedented oil wealth are colliding with an education system that educator and STEMGuyana founder of Dr. Karen Abrams says remains trapped in an outdated model that leaves too many Guyanese unprepared to meaningfully participate in the country’s emerging economy.
In an article published in the Kaieteur News titled “The Education We Have Versus the Education We Need,” Abrams warned that Guyana continues to educate students for a narrow employment structure rather than equipping them to become innovators, entrepreneurs, researchers, and creators capable of building new industries and sustaining long-term national development.
Abrams, who holds a doctorate in educational administration and serves as Executive Director of STEMGuyana, argued that while national discussions often focus on building more schools, training teachers, and improving Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) performance, those measures fail to address deeper structural weaknesses within the education system.
“These things are all true,” Abrams wrote. “They are also insufficient, and the reason they are insufficient is that we have been measuring educational success by the wrong yardstick for at least a generation.”
According to Abrams, Guyana’s education system still largely reflects a colonial model designed to produce workers for established professions rather than citizens capable of creating businesses, solving national problems, or competing in globally tradeable industries.
“The problem is that this educational system was built to produce employees, not founders,” she stated.
Abrams argued that the system rewards “memorisation over problem-identification, deference to authority over independent judgment, and risk-aversion over experimentation,” while many students with entrepreneurial or innovative potential are either overlooked or lost entirely.
“The students who would build new industries, new firms, and new productive capabilities are, with rare exceptions, the same students the system underrates or loses,” she warned.
Her analysis comes amid growing concerns that despite Guyana’s economic boom, many citizens remain ill-positioned to benefit from higher-value opportunities in technology, innovation, business ownership, and specialised industries.
The debate also revives longstanding questions about the direction of Guyana’s education policy since independence.
Following Independence in 1966, the government of Forbes Burnham pursued an education strategy anchored in nation-building, self-reliance, critical thinking, and social mobility. Education was seen not merely as classroom instruction, but as a transformative national tool for dismantling colonial inequalities and breaking away from a system designed largely to produce clerks and functionaries for the colonial state through rote learning and rigid memorisation.
The objective was to cultivate independent thinkers, technically skilled citizens, and a population capable of managing, defending, and developing a newly independent nation. The policy also sought to open doors for working-class and rural Guyanese who had historically been excluded from meaningful educational and economic advancement.
Under Burnham’s administration, Guyana introduced free education from nursery to university in 1976, including at the University of Guyana, while dramatically expanding access to secondary education through the establishment of community high schools, multilateral schools, and technical and vocational institutions designed to equip students with academic, industrial, agricultural, and practical skills needed for national development.
The period also expanded opportunities for second chances and working-class advancement through institutions such as the Critchlow Labour College, which enabled many Guyanese to continue their education and pursue higher learning and professional development.
Education analysts and historians, however, have long argued that many of those gains were rolled back after the People’s Progressive Party assumed office in 1992. Among the early policy shifts were the dismantling of the community high school system and the reintroduction of tuition fees at the University of Guyana — decisions many believe restricted upward mobility and denied thousands of Guyanese the opportunity to pursue higher education based on ability, ambition, and academic potential rather than financial means.
Abrams also highlighted the country’s continuing brain drain, citing research showing that small developing states can lose up to half of their highly skilled labour force through migration.
In Guyana’s case, Abrams noted that approximately 39 percent of the population lives abroad, while roughly half of all Guyanese with tertiary education are residing in the United States alone. The scale of the brain drain was further underscored in a 2026 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report, which found that approximately 90 percent of tertiary-educated Guyanese have migrated overseas, raising serious concerns about the country’s ability to retain the skilled human capital needed for long-term national development.
“The country trains its best minds at significant public expense and then loses them to economies whose markets are deep enough to reward what those minds can do,” Abrams wrote.
She argued that reform must move beyond simply expanding access to education and instead focus on transforming the curriculum itself.
Abrams proposed embedding “problem-identification, design thinking, and entrepreneurship” into secondary education as core competencies, while linking science and mathematics more directly to Guyana’s development challenges, including agriculture, renewable energy, and climate resilience.
She also called for intellectual property literacy to be introduced from age 15 so students understand “that ideas have value and can be protected if the system is used properly.”
Abrams further argued that the University of Guyana should be strategically repositioned to support research, innovation, and globally competitive industries.
“The University of Guyana, properly resourced and strategically positioned, could anchor much of this,” she wrote.
However, she noted that the institution remains underfunded relative to its potential and argued that greater investment in research would do more to strengthen Guyana’s long-term economy than “another decade of conventional capital projects.”
“Education in this country is a strategic asset that has been managed for compliance rather than competitiveness,” Abrams concluded.
“The young people we train will either build Guyana or be lost to it.”
