The Prime Minister made some damning statements on our education system.
These include:
• society has only been concerned with certification and not education;
• it’s about getting a certificate to the point now that they are telling you that they can give you an MBA in six months… a lot of false papers washing in T&T, with uneducated people;
• (we) have consistently spent the largest chunk of our budgetary allocation on education and education has changed the lives of every family in the country;
• the average citizen has to look for more in education, teachers who teach have to teach more than what is coming in the exam.
If, for example, we were to examine the impact of our education system on, or because of our economic system, certain facts emerge.
It is normally believed that increases in the number of educated people in a country drive economic growth and its competitiveness. Instead we find the opposite is the case locally; increases in economic growth, driven by the foreign exchange we earn from the energy sector drive increases in the number of educated/certified people.
In particular the growth of the economy allowed universal primary and secondary education and the widespread use of GATE to fund any who qualified for tertiary education. However, an IDB report showed that some 79 per cent of the graduate workforce of the region emigrates- they were unable to get jobs locally that meet with their training.
The energy sector which is driven by foreign investment, its technology and innovation employs only 4 per cent of the local workforce and forms some 45 per cent of GDP. The onshore commercial/industrial sector forms 35 per cent of GDP.
A study conducted by the Lok Jack Graduate School, UWI, tells us that the majority of on-shore entrepreneurs did not come from the certified tertiary level graduate pool, but were mainly educated at most to secondary level.
The obvious conclusion that can be gleaned from these facts is that the on-shore economy that utilises the foreign exchange earned by the energy sector in the provision of the necessities and luxuries via imports for the population, does not require a highly educated or technologically knowledgeable workforce to carry out its economic- its consumerism- activities.
In other words the knowledge and innovation that necessarily support the energy sector are provided by foreign investment- we maintain and operate plant and dabble in some low level fabrication. The on-shore sector has no need for sophisticated knowledge or innovation to carry out its economic mandate.
Hence, education at the higher levels, in STEM for example, as seen, is not the driver of on-shore economic growth; rather it is something we engage in because the economy can afford it, while many of its graduates are exported- this is a property of a plantation economy. The brutal fact is that the on-shore economy puts no demands on our education system besides the conventional 3Rs and some rudimentary skills.
Diversification of the economy into exports other than those from the energy sector depends specifically on the acquisition of global competitiveness that requires the acquisition of knowledge, our ability to use it in providing exports and innovate with it, even creating new knowledge. Hence, an education system that provides via its centres of excellence the knowledge and highly skilled and specialised human resources is key to any diversification effort we may make.
There was the hope that our education system when left on its own would produce the centres of excellence, the specialised human resources- hence the diversification of the economy; this did not happen.
Etzkowitz demonstrated that there needs to be an integrated system of inclusive institutions if such an economic development system is to exist. He called it the “Triple Helix” which is an amalgam of the private sector, the government and the education system, in particular the R&D institutions. This system, this innovation system, provides the fundamental and chosen knowledge to the private sector entrepreneurs- funded in part by government- who with their own venture capital provide the commercial/industrial clusters that exploit the inventions/innovations. Such an education system has demands placed on it by the economic development of a country.
If we are to make our education system relevant to our economic development, which it is not at the moment, we have to build our own model of the Triple Helix- the Innovation Diamond, one that I have introduced in this space many years ago.
The Prime Minister’s complaint vis a vis society’s concern with certification as opposed to education is a characteristic of a plantation that values on-shore the ‘mas’, the costumes, the education system provides- the certification- and not the substance- the knowledge.
Mary K King
St Augustine