Teaching the Next One

A GBJ Series · Beyond the Resource Curse

Article 11 of 12

GOAL, the exam data, and the trust no syllabus can teach.

By Nabaclis Piknee · October 14, 2026

I spent a working life inside universities, in three different countries. It took me embarrassingly long to fully understand one thing, and I want to tell you about it. A country can build schools and hand out scholarships. Even so, it can fail completely at the thing education is supposed to do for a nation trying to escape a resource curse. Access is not the same as capability. Attendance is not the same as transformation. I have watched Guyana confuse these things for most of my adult life.

Access is not the same as capability. Attendance is not the same as transformation.

— N.P.

What GOAL Got Right, and What It Cannot Do Alone

The GOAL scholarship programme deserves real credit. I do not want this piece to sound dismissive of it, because it is not. GOAL funds thousands of Guyanese students, many of whom could never otherwise have paid for tertiary education. In a country with our history, that is not a small thing. It has opened doors that were shut for generations. A door opened is worth more than a hundred promised.

But a scholarship pays for a seat. It does not, by itself, guarantee what happens in that seat, or to the graduate afterward. I have watched the programme’s governance gaps closely enough to know the concerns are real. Who selects the scholars, and how? Who tracks outcomes once people graduate? Do the funded fields match what the country will need in ten years, or only what is fashionable to study today? And what mechanism holds the programme to account once the money runs out? A scholarship without a strategy behind it is generosity, not policy.

The Deeper Problem Underneath the Test Scores

I have also spent real time with the CSEC and NGSA performance data, region by region. The picture is not encouraging, whatever people believe when they look only at the top students who make the newspaper. Indeed, regional disparities are severe. On average, a Georgetown child and a child in a remote hinterland region receive fundamentally different schooling. Moreover, that gap tracks, disturbingly closely, the same coast-interior inequality this series has touched on more than once. The Ministry of Education has made real interventions over the years, and some regions have shown genuine improvement. But the underlying structure remains: teacher distribution, school infrastructure, and the difficulty of keeping qualified teachers in remote postings. No single programme has solved it yet, oil money or not.

Here is the connection I want you to sit with. Think of every young person in this series so far. There were the ones who left at the airport gate, and the sugar workers whose industry vanished under them. Then there are the villages still waiting to see whether Local Content actually reaches them. All of them passed through this same uneven education system on the way to wherever they ended up. If the foundation is uneven, everything built on top of it inherits that unevenness. For that reason, no amount of oil money flowing into scholarships and school buildings will fix it on its own.

Trust as the Thing Being Taught, or Not Taught

There is one more piece of this that I believe matters as much as the curriculum itself. It comes from data I did not expect to find so troubling when I first went looking. Measures of institutional trust among young Guyanese are low, and they have been low for some time. A generation can sit through years of schooling and still emerge without confidence in the institutions around them. They doubt that government, the police, even the courts will treat them fairly or answer to them honestly. You cannot fix that with a better exam syllabus. After all, trust is not a subject you teach from a textbook. A young person either experiences it directly, growing up watching institutions behave as they should, or does not. No scholarship programme in the world can substitute for that lived evidence.

Citizens, Not Just Graduates

This is the real argument for why education must mean more than access and test scores. It has to produce citizens with an autonomous imagination, not just graduates with degrees. I mean people who can read a Natural Resource Fund report and ask the right follow-up question. I also mean people who understand how their own institutions ought to work. Such citizens can tell the difference between a normal delay and a deliberate obstruction. That is, of course, a much larger task than building more schools. Therefore the final piece in this series has to take it on directly. I do not believe the institutions Guyana currently has, working alone, are yet equal to it.

Next Wednesday: Article 12 of 12, “The University That Doesn’t Exist Yet.”

Beyond the Resource Curse — A GBJ Series

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