Education as a commodity
PART 10
Last week, we discussed how reforms in the education sector opened up business opportunities for private capital. International education is now a multi-billion dollar industry that has power within the decisionmaking circles of governments at the highest levels. We focused on Australian experiences with Indian students and highlighted how this opened up opportunities for a number of players to pursue the profit motive. The visa agents in India who assisted eager students with their visa applications. Other agents in India who helped applicants choose their study programs and institutions of learning in Australia. Influencers from private institutions working tirelessly on luring gullible students into their institutions to increase their numbers and resultant income. Enterprising shysters attempting to assist candidates on student visa with no intention of actually studying in Australia. And the tertiary institutions set up with private capital to complement the services offered by established universities and colleges. The list goes on. After all, one of the key aims of reforms is to encourage, facilitate, mobilise and attract private investment into the public sector. Unfortunately, the profit motive often sits uncomfortably with the public service values expected in these institutions of learning. We ended the last article by briefly alluding to dubious qualifications from private providers. Let us move focus further down that line.
Access to education
PRIVATE provision of education was always going to be a controversial and problematic exercise.
It has long been acknowledged that the entrepreneurial spirit prefers to operate in an environment that is not shackled down by unnecessary rules, regulations, processes and procedures.
A reduction and/or removal of these has spurred unprecedented investment in the sector.
With this movement of private capital, it should have come as no surprise when education began to be seen as a commodity ready to be bought by as wide a range of buyers as possible.
I say “as wide a range of buyers as possible” because prior to this, education (especially at the tertiary levels) could only be accessed by a select group of people.
Education then
When children first enrolled into Class 1, they knew in no uncertain terms that in order to progress to Class 2, they had to pass the exams in Class 1.
The same applied through the ranks until Class 8 when everyone had to sit the Secondary Entrance Examination.
This was the first major national hurdle that all students looked forward to with more than a little bit of trepidation.
Passing this exam meant that students progressed from primary to secondary education — a higher level with its attendant respect and requirements. Two years after that came the Fiji Junior Examinations.
And in Form 5, there was the School Certificate Examinations followed by University Entrance in Form 6.
At each of these stages the level of effort, sacrifices and focus needed to pass the formidable hurdle presented by the attendant examination, intensified. And at each of these stages, there were inevitable casualties.
Some might say that this is a very Darwinian way of viewing education.
We need to note that my focus is on describing what used to be the system that was followed to produce thoroughbred outputs.
There was a combination of intelligence and focused effort involved in the quest to traverse the system successfully. Simply relying on intelligence did not guarantee success whereas it is a given that virtually every child is born with some level of intelligence.
This ensures that with the right type of focused effort and planning very few fall by the wayside.
This combination became particularly interesting at the Form 5 and Form 6 levels because tertiary education beckoned after that.
Moreover, to access that competitive space after qualifying with passes in the UE Exam, one could either self-fund or contest for the limited number of scholarships and financial assistance schemes on offer. Scoring above 300/400 in the NZ UE Exam clearly placed one in the scholarship category.
That is what students toiled for; there was simply no alternative unless personal funding was available.
Anyway, after enrolling for tertiary education, the demands on the student did not really ease off. You had to pass foundation studies, then 100-level units to move to the 200-level and then to the 300-level. If a unit was failed along the way, the pressure mounted to finish within the 4-5 year timeframe.
I agree that the acute pressure of Forms 5 and 6 were of a different type, but the point is that getting a tertiary qualification was no stroll in the park.
We had to strive to make it to graduation and we all knew and appreciated what we had gone through to get to where we were during that eagerly-awaited graduation ceremony.
For those who wanted to go to the next level, special effort had to be made from the very day one sets foot at the university campus.
You had to get very good grades to make it into a post-graduate program.
Access to funding was the other major concern, but a small group of truly outstanding students moved on and at some stage graduated with MAs and PhDs.
Many of these graduates joined academia both here and abroad and became proud members of a select group of outstanding academics.
Many also joined organisations aligned to their areas of expertise and they went on to fly the Fiji flag with special pride.
Education as a right
The scenario outlined above has undergone drastic transformation even though the changes occurred incrementally over time.
There is, however, no denying that these changes resulted from reforms in the education sector. The right to education mantra of UNESCO says that “education is a basic human right that works to raise men and women out of poverty, level inequalities and ensure sustainable development….
The right to quality education is already firmly rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international legal instruments, the majority of which are the result of the work of UNESCO and the United Nations”.
This has often been taken out of context by overenthusiastic and overzealous politicians and bureaucrats.
You see, the right to education mantra has an emotional ring to it that resonates with the electorate.
When we start thinking down that path, we start viewing education not as a competitive process, but a right that comes with age. And this does make sense to some extent.
However, when political demands, expectations and rhetoric begin to conceptualise the whole education process as a right, public expectations are set and churned up in terms of automatic progress through the system.
This is where we heard with more than a little concern protestations from one of our education ministers that all students must move to the next level even if they failed.
Where is the logic in this? How can a student who has failed to master the content of learning at Class 1, cope with the more demanding requirements set at Class 2?
An ominous contention enters the debate when blame is moved to the teachers.
Sure, some teachers are better than others, but isn’t education primarily a joint undertaking between the teacher and the student with time-defined expected inputs from both sides.
My contention is that too much of the responsibility to pass through the education system from one level to another has been removed from the student.
This has nurtured a self-defeating attitude that has affected the quality of our graduates.
We will move back to private providers, the commodification of education and the emergence of dubious qualifications next week.
Until then, sa moce mada.
■ DR SUBHASH APPANNA is a senior USP academic who has been writing regularly on issues of historical and national significance. The views expressed here are his alone and not necessarily shared by this newspaper or his employers subhash.appana@usp.ac.fj