Aug 16, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

(Kaieteur News) – Guyana’s mathematics challenge is not simply that too many children fail examinations. It is that too many students are taught to experience mathematics as a catalogue of rules, formulas and familiar question types, rather than as a language for reasoning through an unfamiliar problem. They learn the procedures; they practice the past papers; they identify the type of question; and, in the best cases, they execute the expected steps. Those things matter. Memorisation has a place. Fluency matters. Practice matters. But none of them, by themselves, produces the kind of mathematical thinker Guyana now needs.

The Ministry of Education should therefore make a deliberate national policy of engaging mathematics specialists wherever they are found; in the Guyanese diaspora, at universities, in research laboratories, in engineering and data-driven industries, and in programmes that have already shown they can expose students to serious mathematics. These specialists should not replace classroom teachers. They should strengthen the system by working alongside them: designing rich tasks, coaching teachers, mentoring students, building assessment tools that measure reasoning, and creating opportunities for learners to tackle problems for which there is no memorised recipe.