Congrats, Grant Memorial

OUR congratulations are extended to Grant Memorial Presbyterian School for topping the Secondary Entrance Assessment exercise, the full results of which are published in today’s Newsday. According to the results, which were presented personally to the San Fernando school by Education Minister Hazel Manning yesterday, ten of the 299 students of Grant Memorial who wrote the SEA scored in the first 100 places of the assessment. But what makes this achievement even more outstanding is the performance of Reanna Gobin who secured first place among the 20,814 pupils writing the SEA this year.

The continuing success of Grant Memorial comes as a refreshing counterpoint to the problems now proliferating in the country’s school system, including acts of indiscipline and poor teaching standards. Schools such as Grant Memorial assure us that the picture may not be as gloomy as it seems, that while there are many poor performers there are also those dedicated to the task, maintaining high standards and turning out students who, from their learning and attitude, will most likely do credit to our society. It is not surprising that Reanna Gobin has repeated the success of Grant Memorial’s Safa Omardeen who topped the SEA in 2000.

In her address to the school, Mrs Manning saw Grant Memorial as  “an example of what the Government of Trinidad and Tobago and the Ministry of Education have set as the vision for the holistic development of our children.” She noted that, in addition to its academic programme of study, the school excelled in non-traditional subjects such as the visual and performing arts, drama, music, technology education and in the Project Peace initiative. We would like to endorse the tribute paid by the Minister to retiring Principal Lennox Surjuesingh, Vice Principal Harold Nathi and the teachers, students, parents and guardians of children attending Grant Memorial. They have set examples of excellence which we would like to see other primary schools in the country emulating.

The achievement of Grant Memorial also confirms, in our view, two features of our education system. The most immediate, of course, is the emergence of girls among the country’s leading students and scholarship winners. Time was when boys ruled the academic roost, a legacy of our colonial past. Now with equality of the sexes fairly well established, girls have been demonstrating that, in the “brains department” they are as capable and, in many respects, even superior to their male counterparts. The second feature is a fact of history, that the quality and success of schools run by denominational boards are significantly higher than those of state-run institutions. Grant Memorial, for example, remains a credit to the Grant family, Canadian missionaries who not only planted the Presbyterian Church here many decades ago but also built schools originally to accomodate children of sugar plantation workers.

Over the years, the performance of schools run by denominational boards would testify in a similar way to this pattern. There is no denying, then, the beneficial influence of religious bodies on the country’s education system, a fact that we must acknowledge and appreciate. What can we tell the 20,814 students who will now begin a crucial phase of their education in secondary schools? Will our advice, our urging, that they strive to take full advantage of this opportunity for their own personal development and success and for that of their country have any effect? The results at this level are not encouraging, but we can only wish them well and hope for the best.