What the Child Decides

 

Sunday Essay  ·  Education & Society

In the era of oil, what is Guyana teaching its children about their own worth?

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D.  ·  March 30, 2026

Brooklyn, New York — Let us begin, as James Baldwin began, with an acknowledgment of danger.

We are living through a dangerous time. Not the danger of external threat alone — not the missiles over the Gulf, not the crude oil price that climbs on someone else’s catastrophe — but the interior danger that Baldwin named in 1963 and that no amount of GDP growth has yet resolved: the danger of a society that does not know itself, and that is therefore teaching its children the wrong things about who they are.

Baldwin spoke to American teachers. I am writing to Guyanese ones. But the paradox he named belongs to every society that has organized itself around a lie.

The question I want to put before us this Sunday is deceptively simple: in the era of oil, in the nation that ExxonMobil is remaking every quarter, what is Guyana teaching its children about their own worth?

Baldwin’s central argument is this. The purpose of education is to produce a person capable of examining the society in which he lives — capable of asking questions, making his own decisions, deciding for himself what is true. But no society genuinely wants that person. What societies want, rather, is a citizenry that will obey. The paradox of education is therefore the paradox of consciousness itself: to be truly educated is to be, in some sense, at war with the world that educated you. The teacher who understands this — who accepts the full weight of the task — must be prepared, as Baldwin puts it, to “go for broke.”

The Guyanese child stands at the intersection of at least three lies, each dressed as a celebration.

The Lie of the Oil Miracle

The first is the lie of the oil miracle. She is told — in national speeches, in budget documents, in the language of Brand Guyana — that Guyana is being transformed. That a new era is here. That the wells offshore will make her whole. The numbers are undeniably staggering: production in the Stabroek Block reached 900,000 barrels per day in November 2025, driving a real GDP growth rate of 43.6% in 2024 ^{[1] [2]}.

Yet, in the same week that these milestones are announced, her government cancels more than US$3.1 million from a World Bank loan designed to build the institutional capacity that would allow Guyana to negotiate with ExxonMobil as something approaching an equal ^[3]. The fiscal management component of that loan — the part that would have strengthened oversight of how the oil money flows — was dropped at the government’s own request ^[3].

The World Bank said it plainly in its project documentation: without this capacity, Guyana cannot improve its “bargaining power vis-à-vis investors in situations of negotiations, oversight, and enforcement.” The transformation is real; the question is who it is transforming things for.

The Lie of Inclusion

The second lie is the lie of inclusion. The cash grants, the new bridges, the roads percentages-complete — these are the grammar of a social contract being negotiated at the ATM. But a grant is not a guarantee. A transfer is not a transformation. The mathematics here is not complicated: a nonzero term added to a function that has not changed does not change the function.

If the structural conditions that determine a child’s life chances — the quality of her school, the credentials of her teachers, her access to a curriculum that tells the truth about the world — remain unchanged, then the grant is pacification, not liberation. While the 2026 education budget has increased, Guyana’s historical spending on education as a percentage of GDP has lagged behind other resource-rich nations that successfully avoided the resource curse, such as Norway and Botswana ^{[4] [5]}.

“Baldwin’s distinction applies with full force: the society that wants obedient citizens offers the porter a raise. The society that wants free citizens builds him a school.”

The Lie of History

The third lie is the lie of history. This one runs deepest. Guyana is a post-colonial society that has not yet fully reckoned with what colonialism actually did. It divided the laboring classes by race — African and Indian against each other — so that neither would organize against the structures of extraction. It told each group a story about the other group that served the interests of neither. Walter Rodney spent his life naming this mechanism. He did not survive the naming. And we have not, as a nation, built the curricular infrastructure to ensure that every Guyanese child knows Rodney’s name, understands his argument, and inherits his analytical courage. We have not taught the child the shape of the conspiracy against her. And therefore we have not given her the weapon she needs to refuse it.

Baldwin’s most radical claim is also his most precise. He says: if the child suspects his own worth, he has already begun to attack the entire power structure. This is why the power structure cannot afford for the child to know his worth. The erasure of Black history in America was not neglect — it was architecture. It was built to do a specific job.

I want to apply that precision to our moment.

In mathematics, we speak of existence proofs. You do not need to solve a problem in general to demonstrate that a solution exists. You need one example — rigorous, reproducible, undeniable — and the paradigm shifts. My “Beyond a Googol” project named ninety-plus Black mathematicians not as a diversity gesture but as an epistemological intervention. The absence of these names from the standard curriculum is not an oversight. It is a form of governance. In 2022, African Americans earned only 1.2 percent of all mathematics and statistics doctorates in the United States ^[6].

When a student at Medgar Evers College cannot imagine herself at the Institute for Advanced Study, it is not because she lacks the capacity. It is because she has been given no existence proof that the path is real. The curriculum is the conspiracy.

This is Baldwin’s argument, rendered in the language of my discipline.

And here is what makes the Guyanese moment so urgent: Guyana is currently writing its curriculum. Not metaphorically — literally. The oil revenues are reshaping what the state can build, what it chooses to build, and therefore what it is teaching the next generation about what is possible and for whom. The question is not whether Guyana will invest in education. The question is what kind of education. Will it be education that produces — as Baldwin demands — citizens capable of examining the society being built around them? Or will it produce what every extractive economy has historically produced: a skilled technical class that services the industry, and a credentialed managerial class that administers the contracts, and a broad citizenry that is told the transformation is happening for its benefit and is expected to be grateful?

The Collapse of Epistemic Infrastructure

I have been thinking about the closure of Stabroek News.

For thirty-nine years, that newspaper was one of the mechanisms by which Guyanese society looked at itself honestly. Its founders understood what they were doing. They were building epistemic infrastructure — the kind of institution that a democracy requires not as a luxury but as a precondition. The state understood this too, which is why it withheld advertising revenue in a pattern that the de Caires family described, with characteristic Guyanese understatement, as “a rather crude attempt to muzzle the free press.”

The impact of such actions is measurable. While Guyana ranks 73rd overall in the 2025 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, its score on the political indicator — which measures the degree of political pressure and control over the media — sits at a dismal 111th out of 180 countries ^[7].

Baldwin told his teachers: I would teach the child that the press he reads is not as free as it says it is — and that he can do something about that, too.

The press is gone. What the child does about that is now the question.

The Guyana Business Journal exists, in part, to hold this ground. The webinars, the Sunday Essays, the analytical series on the Natural Resource Fund, on electoral integrity, on gender equity, on Amerindian language — these are not journalism in the traditional sense. They are something closer to what Baldwin was describing: an insistence that the society examine itself, that the questions remain in circulation, that the mechanisms of accountability not fall silent simply because one of the institutions designed to sustain them has closed its doors.

But let us not be romantic about this. One journal does not replace a newspaper. The void is real. And a society that cannot sustain independent press is not suffering a media failure — it is suffering a crisis of self-knowledge. It does not know what it thinks. And a society that does not know what it thinks is teaching its children, by example, that thinking is optional.

What the Child Decides

So: what does the child decide?

Baldwin’s answer is unambiguous. The child — the Black child in America, the Guyanese child in the oil era, any child whose society has organized itself around a partial truth — has exactly two choices. She can accept the society’s verdict about what she is worth, swallow the inarticulate rage, and become the porter who tells you it’s raining when you ask about the sun. Or she can decide — early, deliberately, against the evidence of everything around her — that a mistake has been made somewhere, and that she is not what she has been told she is.

That decision is not merely psychological. It is political. It is the foundational act of citizenship. And it is the thing that education, properly understood, is supposed to facilitate.

My students at Medgar Evers College make this decision every semester. They arrive having been told, in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that mathematics is not for them — that rigor is the enemy of access, that the IAS seminar room belongs to someone else. My “MEC to MIT” philosophy is not a slogan. It is a structural argument about what the curriculum owes the student. It owes her the existence proof. It owes her the full weight of the mathematical tradition — not a simplified version designed to confirm what the society has already decided about her capacity — and it owes her the pedagogical environment in which her own capacity can become legible to her.

This is Baldwin’s task, translated into the language of mathematics education. The teacher who goes for broke is not the teacher who makes the material easier. She is the teacher who refuses to accept the society’s verdict about what the student can bear.

Guyana is at a threshold. Not the threshold we usually describe — the one measured in barrels per day, in GDP growth, in infrastructure kilometers. The deeper threshold. The one that asks: what kind of people will the oil era produce?

The answer is being written now, in every classroom where a teacher decides whether to tell the child the truth about her history. In every budget line that chooses a cash transfer over a school. In every governance reform that is cancelled because the state has decided that knowing what it is worth is too costly. In every newsroom that falls silent.

What the child decides depends, in the first instance, on what we decide. On whether the teachers go for broke. On whether the institutions hold. On whether we — diaspora and domestic, scholars and editors and civil society — insist on building the epistemic architecture that makes honest self-examination possible.

Baldwin closed by warning that if the country does not find a way to use the child’s energy, it will be destroyed by that energy. The warning was for America. It travels.

The project before us in Guyana is nothing less than this: to build, in the era of oil, a society that teaches its children they are worth examining the world they will inherit. Not managing it for someone else. Not servicing its infrastructure. Examining it. Changing it. Deciding, against every verdict the old architecture has delivered, that a mistake has been made somewhere — and that they are the ones who will correct it.

That is what a genuine education produces. That is what we owe the child.

And that is the only argument worth making in this moment.

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References

1. ExxonMobil. Daily oil production hits 900,000 barrels in Guyana’s Stabroek block (November 12, 2025). corporate.exxonmobil.com
2. Reuters. Oil output, exports drove Guyana economy’s growth of 43.6% in 2024 (January 17, 2025). reuters.com
3. World Bank Group. Disclosable Restructuring Paper – Guyana Petroleum Resources Governance and Management Project – P166730 (December 24, 2025). documents.worldbank.org
4. World Bank. Government expenditure on education, total (% of GDP) – Guyana. data.worldbank.org
5. Global Partnership for Education. Education in Guyana (2022). globalpartnership.org
6. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE). Academic Fields Where Blacks Earned Few or No Doctoral Degrees in 2022 (February 19, 2024). jbhe.com
7. Reporters Without Borders (RSF). World Press Freedom Index: Guyana (2025). rsf.org

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