AN ANONYMOUS PERSON from the Madang Province in PNG wrote in to The National newspaper and made a stinging criticism against the policy of education reform in PNG. The general thrust of the letter decries the quality of education given to Papua New Guinean children under the present system of education reform. The letter reads as follows:
So if the old system of education was delivering quality education and producing the kind of skilled manpower that PNG needs, why must it succumb to the seductions of a reformist philosophy which has frustrated effective learning and sponsored a policy that encourages intellectual degeneration? Part of the answer to this dilemma lies in the seductive abberations of numerical thinking that is bound up with a moral impulse to democratise universal education to all peoples. If that was the moral, the economics that came with it appears under the rubric of user-pay policy promulgated and prescribed as conditions for financial loans from organisations as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The major site of concentration of the education reform in PNG has been at the level of primary education. The numerical logic behind this concentration stems from the assumption that there are lot of children at the lower levels of education compared to those in secondary and tertiary institutions. A kind of pyramid structure organises the number of educated people in different levels of education with a bulk of the population being illiterate or less educated being assigned their spot at the base of the pyramid while a small number of educated people are found at the higher levels of education.
Given this apparent pyramidic configuration, a kind of utilitarian ethic was adopted as a remedial measure aimed at inverting the base of the pyramid based on the moral view of universal education. Although this ethical principle was never spelt out in the policy of education reform, its moral persuasion comes from the conceptual appeal that one might quantify happiness on the grounds that a policy is morally right if it has a methodological facility to deliver the mass happiness (universal education) for a mass number of people.
In this light, it seem morally right to educate as many children as you can find in lower levels of education because the higher you climb up the ladder of education, less people become educated. In PNG this saw a mushroom-like proliferation of top-up and secondary schools. Communities in many parts of rural and urban PNG were forced to go out and find their own ways of raising money to build their schools and at times they found themselves in competition with each other trying to get money from the same sources such as a Member of Parliament or from a donor agency. While it gives them a sense of autonomy and ownership over the creation of this educational infrastructures, the communities had little control over the issues of curriculum development and critical pedagogy.
Concurrently major changes were made to re-order the grades or level of primary and secondary schooling in which some of us went through in the previous system. For instance, in the present reform, and in some parts of rural PNG only, kids go through some 3-4 four years of vernacular education before going into an English curriculum in the latter half of primary education. The teachers of vernacular education are not qualified teachers but handpicked volunteers who often commit themselves to teaching without being paid. The grades 7-8 of what used to be high school years is now relegated to the apex of the top-up schools and the teachers who teach there are not university trained but educated in lower teacher colleges.
While top-up and second-schools were mushrooming throughout the country, there was no corresponding physical growth at the higher institutes of learning such as colleges and universities to accomodate the number of graduates that were coming out of primary and secondary schools. This leads to a real bottle-neck situation that was not not foreseen and anticipated by the desire to invert the pyramidic structure of education. To cut the long story short, the present education reform in PNG has severly compromised the quality of education in PNG and kids who come out of this system will have to work much much harder to cope up with the demands of learning that their peers have elsewhere around the Pacific.
It is not just the quality that is being compromised, the numerical logic of utilitarian ethics is questionable. The moral of universal education is a virtue we may all subscribe to but it should not be pursued at the cost of compromising quality education to the point of submitting our children to a curriculum that is characterised by intellectual mediocrity and cognitve degeneration. The moral of user-pay policy also has got its mathematics wrong in some very critical ways. That is, it focuses on the number of heads being educated rather than on the output that graduates in various levels of education would bring to the workforce and the economy as a whole. The language and economics of education reform in PNG conceals an insidious deformity within its make-up and it is already time for PNG to re-evaluate the merits of this policy.
It really is quite enigmatic that whilst we would like PNGian students at school to master the English language and do better in subjects such as written expression we concurrently thru our current education policy attempt to preserve the local venaculars by teaching children at an early age their tokples.
Naturally most children acquire a foreign language better at an early age and after a couple of years of learning their tokples, which most acquire at home anyway, they are then “forced” to learn English at the latter grades. Conseqently, they will be slow to learn and appropriately use the language in writing and speaking.
English is the formal language of communication in government and the formal sector in PNG, hence it is a necessary language for PNGians to understand, at least at some basic level. Without some basic understanding of English it will be difficult for ordinary PNGians to find formal employment, start up a business, understand medical instructions on medications, read a manual etc.
I wonder if there is a better way to teach and preserve the local venaculars in a way that does not affect PNG children learning English. I would suggest we reverse the process by having kids at a younger age learn English and after, say high school, enroll in optional local venacular classes as they can at an older age have a better grasp of their native tongue using the structure of the English language and not vice versa.
Perhaps an expert in pedagogy can provide a better advice.
I’m no expert in pedagogy, but I am quite certain that the weaknesses of PNG’s post-reform education system have nothing to do with the choice of language used in schooling. Vernacular education (or more broadly, “culturally relevant” education) has been an area of intense concern in PNG policy discussion for decades, and it only makes sense for young children who do not know English to be taught in a language they can actually understand for their first years at school — provided that (a) they are taught well, and (b) they have the opportunity to bridge to English-based schooling later. But alas, as Andrew points out, neither of these conditions actually obtains in PNG. Few children get the chance to go on, and the quality of the teaching they do get in their early few years is completely unreliable because the teachers are unsupported — except to some extent by their communities, where the schools are naturally highly politicized, and by the mission organization SIL, which has its own interest in promoting vernacular literacy given its two-part agenda of creating tok ples bibles and getting people to read them. In effect, what this cynical neoliberal reform has done is allow the state to give up responsibility for the job of preparing children for formal education, purporting to give people control while in fact doing just the opposite. It’s like putting people in a tiny room and telling them they are free to run just as fast they want! My great worry is that the long-term effect of educational failure is going to be felt not only in people’s preparation for higher education and the workplace, but more pervasively and devastatingly in morale.