Surasena was a scraggy boy with a runny nose, most of the time. He came to school sometimes, when he was well enough. Coughs and colds were a part of him. The entire school had an enrolment of less than 100; attendance varied from about 80 to about 100. Enrolment fell as students dropped out as they grew older: in grade V, there were usually 6 or 7 students, mostly boys. Most students were in Kindergarten, the Lower and the Upper. There were six teachers, one female, who was the principal’s wife, and both came from about 75 km away. They lived in the principal’s quarters with no other suitable house they could rent in the village. There was one English teacher, a man who cycled daily from a considerable distance. He was remarkably regular. He was the class teacher for Grade III and taught English in grades III, IV and V. He had had no special training in teaching English, or any other language and his final year students could hardly write the English alphabet without error. The parents of the children were mostly illiterate and hardly came to school after they had brought their child for admission. Surasena’s illiterate parents saw no function they could serve in the school. Teachers did the teaching.

Although Surasena was irregular in attendance, he picked up what was taught in class without any effort. When the end-of-term tests came, if he were present, he always came first in class. One teacher noticed this and spoke to the principal. The teacher thought that the boy was bright enough to win a scholarship if the gaps in his knowledge of arithmetic could be filled. Because the boy had come to school only when he was well, there were large gaps in his competence, especially in arithmetic. The young teacher took up the challenge, and when the results came, the boy had done well. So began a venture, which few had set out on then. One scholarship after another carried him to the highest centre of learning in his discipline, where he earned the highest degree any university could award.

Then a career: compromising among several objectives and laying aside many objections, Surasena decided to work for the world’s primary intergovernmental organisation. In doing so, he chose to live in the richest city in the world. Rich cities offer citizens many and varied services unavailable in less sophisticated habitats: theatres, concert halls, public libraries, high quality schools, universities, good sanitation and sophisticated architecture. Surasena chose to send their children to a unique school where both students and teachers came from many parts of the world. When the children prepared to go to university, each of them found her/himself in the first percentile of intellectual ability. Each chose to attend the highest quality colleges and universities. Their first jobs were with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve System, both the highest-level regulatory agencies in that country. They eventually changed their careers and residences. One took up to law in New York City and the other a professorship in a state university.

Two young men in the fourth generation have completed secondary school and are in universities studying engineering.

An illiterate family goes to university. A family that lived in a coconut leaf thatched hut in a remote village lives in good housing in choice parts of cities, large and small. A boy who had only rice ration books in his home dispersed his collection of nearly one thousand books to several universities. A man who had never seen a play on a stage goes to Broadway and Carnegie Hall regularly. A young man in the fourth generation plays the saxophone at the Lincoln Centre. A family in the first generation that had not ventured beyond its native district, in the second generation, travels the world over. With different destinations and varied byways, these paths have been traversed by thousands of individuals and families in our society. A different and much larger cohort of our labour force, young, healthy and literate, has been pushed out of our economy.

I have used a fictional name to avoid embarrassing individuals. The rest of the narrative is factual. These sequences are repeated many thousands of times in this country, a highly mobile society. Neither poverty nor social position or habitat in town nor country bars children of ability from going where they wish. (One last habitat is systematically denied access to the high roads. One expects these roads to open literally and metaphorically, in short order.) We have had several employees in our household who used their earnings to pay for their children’s education at university. A few weeks back, one of those children graduated from a prestigious medical faculty in the country. A child in another family is in university studying mathematics. I reckon that is not an uncommon or infrequent occurrence.

It is one thing to move up the education ladder and another to find mobility within the economy. The space at the top is created in the economy and not in schools. It is an easy and common confusion to think that young men and women cannot find employment because they studied the wrong subjects at school or university. No matter what they learnt at school and university, they will be unemployed so long as there is no demand for labour. And the demand for labour is a function of the structure and the level of activity in the economy, not of the education system. Well into the second half of the 19th century, the founders of Dartmouth College declared, ‘though our great objective was to erect a seminary for educating ministers of the gospel, yet we hope that it will be a means of raising up men that will be useful in other learned professions- ornaments of the state as well as the church.’ And the United States was rushing to be the largest economy in the world. From 1929 to about 1936, there was high unemployment in most capitalist economies because economic activity fell disastrously and not because there was something suddenly wrong with education in those countries. Millions of rural folk in China and India, with no special education or training, marched to factories, when entrepreneurs opened workplaces for them. In both instances, the cause of unemployment is a lack of demand for labour. In China and India, demand arose when enterprises, both national and international, were created to produce goods and services. For markets in rich countries. Workers from Lanka took planes to workplaces overseas, where there was demand for them. Others remain unemployed in this country, because there are no enterprises that can pay competitive wages.

That brings us to the woeful inadequacy of interpleural activity in this country. The provision of health and sanitation and education in this country has been primarily the government’s responsibility. They have been resounding successes. Their success has had expected consequences on population changes. Our governments have systematically invested in peasant agriculture, placing populations from crowded areas in less densely populated areas. During the last 20 years or so, governments have invested, at exorbitant cost, in infrastructure development. The main visible enterprises in the private sector are in finance, construction and the manufacture of garments. Garment manufacturing is a low productivity activity (shoved out of high productivity economies), and there is severe competition for market shares. China (+Taiwan), Malaysia and India have employed millions of people in manufacturing high-wage products for markets in growing markets. To make matters worse, ground conditions in Lanka over a long period have been inimical to foreign enterprises. In the early 1960s, whatever foreign enterprises were inherited from colonial times were nationalized. Since then, the fate of attempts to establish foreign enterprises has not been bright. Every successive government, during the last few decades, has declared itself welcoming foreign investment. There were no takers. Foreign capital that came created disabling debt. In a society notoriously lacking entrepreneurial talent and overrun with corruption, debt inflows will create problems. We must grow enterprises (not wayside kade, which is a common sign of underemployment) and decide to create conditions that truly welcome foreign investment to provide full-time time well-paying jobs.

An education system by itself can do little to create employment, except in teaching.

by An Observer