Some Heretical Thoughts

Education’s ‘Three Es’ and the McUniversities:

Continued from yesterday

Keynote Address delivered by Panduka Karunanayake Senior Lecturer in the Department of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo, at 16th Annual Higher Education Conference in Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka Association for Improving Higher Education Effectiveness on July 24, 2020: Colombo.

Equity

Equity has been described as freedom from bias or favouritism, and in education this highlights access to education. One might have thought that this was a political project, but today I am rather more inclined to believe that it too was an economic project, driven by the capitalist industries and masquerading as a political project.

To understand this, let us go back to the Industrial Revolution. At that time, the capitalist industries were setting up factories that needed manual labour, and they needed large numbers of factory workers with basic competencies like literacy, numeracy and punctuality. It was this set of skills that the schools of the day, which gave a universal education sponsored by their governments, taught children. Timetables with periods were introduced into schools to instill a sense of time and the habit of working according to the clock. So school education was at least as much an industry-driven, economics-related step as a political step.

In a similar way, it was the emergence of the knowledge industries in the 1960s that led to the massification of university education. And the knowledge industries had had to look for knowledge workers not only from their host countries but also from other countries, at least partly because educating knowledge workers was a very expensive affair.

You might call me a cynic, but I don’t see our own education system as much more than a huge, expensive, government-sponsored programme to serve the knowledge industries of the First World – not because that is what it should be, but because that is what it is designed to be. It identifies the cleverest of our students through a series of tough competitive exams, gives them a ‘free’ school and university education that – thanks to World Bank-funded projects like the IRQUE project and the HETC project – trains them to make them fit for the knowledge industries, and enables their emigration through schemes like PhD scholarships, Green Cards and PR schemes. It is not for nothing that in one of our state universities its undergraduates call the Department of Chemistry the ‘US visa office’! Your president will be aware that final-year Engineering students are interviewed by US industries even before they sit their final examination, skimming them off as soon as the examination results are released. Aren’t these widely considered the success stories of our education system?

It is a moot point whether this education system actually benefits our country itself. Can we really produce new knowledge, when we are a long way from the core in the core-periphery relationship of knowledge production? Besides, what the country is left with are mostly school dropouts, university-rejects and unemployed graduates. What is worse, we have also introduced an unhealthy sense of competitiveness and killer instinct to all our students, and indeed even our academics, in a world where you can win only with collaboration and teamwork. And now in the COVID-19 world, when the First World knowledge industries begin to fall apart, our successful knowledge workers who emigrated to greener pastures may come back with a new-found patriotism, to grab the few good jobs that were previously available here to the local leftovers.

Again, please don’t misunderstand me. I am indeed aware of the democratic role of education, its role in economic development and preparing the citizens of the future, and the concept of private gains. But to champion these ideas, we first need to completely overhaul our education system, rather than continuing with our present system and simply pumping more money into it. That is known as the fallacy of escalating commitment.

If equity was always a problem, then it has further worsened in the COVID-19 world, where teaching/learning activities are shifting to the online mode or blended learning. The vast majority of our students lack a laptop and WiFi connection and are struggling to keep pace with a smartphone and mobile data package. What are the implications of this unequal distribution of the technology necessary for effective blended learning?

Effectiveness

Effectiveness has been described as the ability to produce a decided, decisive or desired result. Earlier, when universities were elite organisations with only a small number of intellectually-gifted students, they had small-scale, tutor-led teaching. Undergraduates were more-or-less assured of the transformative education that characterised our past idea of higher education. But with equity and massification, students with less than optimum learning skills – who have been called ‘subprime students’ – also found their way into the universities in the 1970s. In Sri Lanka too, this started with the loss of university autonomy in the 1960s and the district quota allocation in the 1970s, both of which were introduced to bridge the urban-rural divide in unversity admissions (De Silva 1974).

It was not that universities were ineffective before – but now, they had to be effective at a new level. But if we accept equity for whatever reason, be it economic or political, then we are compelled to accept this need for the new effectiveness as well.

Undergraduate education today only produces, at best, knowledge workers for the knowledge industries – whom Lewis Coser (1970) called ‘mental technicians’ rather than ‘freely speculating minds’.