Archive for the 'Education' Category

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:

BEFORE the emergence of education reform system, speaking tokples and tokpisin was a punishable offence in primary and secondary schools. English was the only language that was allowed to be used for communication anywhere within the school’s boundary. As a result, students speak and write good English. Today it is different. Students are communicating in tokpisin and teachers are not strict anymore and, consequently, many students cannot master their written expression examinations. How can such a phenomenon boost effective learning? What is wrong with the old education system? It produced engineers, pilots, doctors, lawyers, political scientists, etc. Did that mean the old system had failed PNG? I cannot understand the education reformers with this confusing system. I urge the Government to immediately dissolve the new education reforms and bring back the old system.

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.