Payment by Results in British Guiana, 



By Peter de Wever, Assistant Secretary, B G. Teachers' Association. 



]N these days of searching enquiry and thorough 

 investigation into everything that pertains to 

 human happiness and comfort, it has become a 

 recognised axiom of Political Economy and Sociology 

 that the prevention of an evil is far to be preferred to 

 its cure. Education as a preventative agency is gene- 

 rally considered the most efficacious in dealing with the 

 innumerable social woes by which countries as well as 

 communities are unhappily affli6led. It is therefore 

 well and beneficial to consider our educational ma- 

 chinery, and see whether it is fitted to fulfil the pur- 

 poses for which it was created, after we have first searched 

 the records of the past and discovered for ourselves 

 whether we have benefited by the experience of by-gone 

 days. 



In 1862, Governor HiNCKS, on his arrival in the 

 colony, found, as all Governors after him have subse- 

 quently found, that education in British Guiana was in a 

 very backward condition. To rectify the evils then 

 prevalent, as well as to provide means for the adequate 

 instru6lion of the masses, the Court of Policy of his day 

 passed an Education Ordinance. This made provision 

 tor the formation of a Board of Education, whose duty 

 it was to frame regulations for the direftion and control 

 of elementary instru6lion in schools receiving aid from 

 the colony. This was, stri£lly speaking, the first " Board 

 of Education." Under the regulations which were soon 



