The flaw in product-driven education policy
Published:Friday | July 8, 2011 | 12:00 AM
Wilberne Persaud, Financial Gleaner Columnist
Among the animal kingdom, we humans possess capacities that set us apart, that make us unique as a species.
I won't dwell on the fact that unlike say, the lion's pride, seal or raptor that kill for food and survival, we routinely kill indiscriminately, often merely for fun. Nor need we dwell on our ability to identify and unleash almost unimaginable destructive powers hidden in nature.
I want rather, among our unique characteristics, to consider our ability to imagine, envision and/or speculate on the future.
Note carefully, I do not say 'predict' the future. We survey land and create drawings of landscapes and buildings. We create three-dimensional scale models of our idea or vision before construction. No bee, solitary or social, can do this even though their 'buildings' achieve the highest structural standards—the hexagonal cell construction of a honeycomb is a marvel of economy in material use, yet providing robust and enduring structural integrity.
What's the point of all this, you ask? I'm trying to introduce, or preferably reinforce the idea that we should effortlessly grasp potential outcomes of our actions based on two things - first, our ability to envision the future and second, our capacity to know and reflect on the past, put differently, to 'learn' from history.
Tales of woes
I come to this because of what seems to be our Government's approach, in practice, to public-sector wages policy and the mooted idea, attributed to our minister of education, to channel financial support for tertiary education through a mechanism that puts funds into the hands of students who would, by their revealed preference, influence the market for 'education' products.
Both of these ideas, or approaches to policy exposed by practice, are awfully flawed and shall have consequences we'll live to regret.
Stokeley Marshall, in a mature, well-argued July 3 Sunday Herald article, 'Government prosecutors on the brink', recounts tales of woe faced by lawyers practising their skill for the public sector, in the public interest. Apparently some fast-thinking money changer/counter has figured out that de-linking these attorneys' compensation packages from those of the judiciary and other tactics, delaying settlement and the like, are good ways to save money and perhaps meet IMF targets.
In an already broken and decrepit system for delivery of justice, this is but a misplaced reliance on false savings knee-jerkery. Better look elsewhere for the required savings. Perhaps we might target corruption and its big sister, cost overruns.
As to students' choices for study at the vintage accomplished age 18-25 in the Jamaican secondary school environment, we should end up in a woeful mess. Perhaps we'll surpass Usain Bolt's prowess in our race to the bottom.
The apprentice shall instruct the master in the decision as to what he or she must learn and explore.
Particularly at our level of development, to consider tertiary education policy in these terms is swallowing hook, line and sinker, the piece of garbage that says the 'market' always knows best.
That dangerous idea leads us to recurring financial crashes, to no blame being attached to almost criminal negligence among financiers, to false notions of achieving efficiency and an ideological comfort available only to the well off in society.
Please ministers, do rethink these ideas; today's world of explosively knowledge-based output leave us precious little room for such avoidable blunders.