Home ›› 05 Sep 2021 ›› Editorial
The discourse of Yasin Arafat with Rifat Islam on August 29, 2021 in the Business Post’s Biztech was illuminating and exciting; illuminating as this revealed the immediate urgency of tailoring the education spectrum on competencies and exciting as this draws a road map of success of a boy from square one with determination to be an entrepreneur in a decade. This dialogue unfolds many issues pertaining to the weaknesses of the current education system and defines appropriate strategies in developing skilled manpower. Human resources planning is crucial in feeding the development process and can be obtained only through a need based education system. The lesson is very plain; digging stepwise entrepreneurship while sticking to a narrow domain with intensity. Yasin’s tips are to learn skill based subjects such as word press, content writing, graphic design, coding and animation. It is desirable to concentrate talent on a particular work, saving both energy and time. Indeed, the technology based education during the last two decades warrants depth in knowledge in specific skills for competitiveness in the global market. Thus general education without any focus is redundant in this dynamic world.
You cannot equate today’s education with the education of three or four decades back where extra years of schooling and wider access to university education are regarded as the pivot of human capital. This is the principal lesson of the book, Does Education Matter? [2002] written by a non-economist Alison Wolf, a professor of education at the University of London. She emphasized that resource allocation in different tiers of education should be on the basis of the criteria of private and social rate of return. The government should allocate more resources in the tier where the social rate of return is higher as in primary and secondary education. Thus general and defunct education at tertiary level does not mean more growth rather it is the training in skill development and investment in the required competencies that can propel growth and be a catalyst in growth physiology. Unfortunately, it is observed that resources are thinly spread out where the social rate of return is higher and more emphasis is placed on general education with higher private rate of return. It constitutes both a social and private burden when students leave primary and secondary schools without minimum levels of literacy and basic skills in mathematics. Again “modern societies also need excellent universities producing substantial but not vast numbers of graduates equipped to be researchers and practitioners in medicine, engineering and the sciences”. The crux of the issue is productivity as when a society’s individuals are more productive; the society itself is more productive. Thus expansion of education thoughtlessly may actually weaken the link with growth and again “preoccupation with growth narrows and distorts society’s idea of what education should be.
Unfortunately, disregarding the basic norm on productivity, many countries prefer to align with quantitative targets: “the government wants ever more people to go to university, and has tailored its financing policies to that end” at a huge cost that decelerates the growth dynamics. Moreover, the quality of education is sacrificed with both an increased number of students and at the same time starving of resources in a few universities “preparing the very brightest students for their role at the cutting -edge of science and technology.”
The book Does Education Matter? addresses the education policy of Tony Blair and successive governments but many countries follow the footsteps of Britain and Bangladesh is not an exception. It is teaching the basics at primary school where adequate funding could help to improve the levels of “Learning Poverty'' across the globe. “Learning Poverty” is an objective assessment tool that indicates the deficiency level of 10-year old children who cannot read and understand a simple story by the end of primary school. In low- and middle-income countries “learning poverty” stands at 53%, while for the poorest countries, this is 80% on average.
The education system must strive for internal and external efficiency. External efficiency shows the link between education and the labor market and internal efficiency ensures the quality of output in feeding the education sector. An ideal model to meet the external and internal efficiency is to trace the Finland education system. Finland with a total score of 1.63K is ranked at the 3rd position in the world in 2021. Education system in Finland is designed “with the motto to equip students with incremental life skills” and only the best output from education [10 percent of the top] is recruited in the teaching job. There is a clear bifurcation in the education tiers with general and vocational streams. Students opt for one of them after nine years of compulsory education; Finnish children begin their academic life at seven years old and they sit only for a standardization exam at the age of sixteen. It is not like our country where students now sit for four public examinations in the same cohort. The curriculum emphasized the foundational basics during the nine years of compulsory education that equipped students with core hard and soft skills indispensable at the working life. Students are encouraged to find out what is the best for them academically and career-wise after the compulsory education.
There are now over 150 universities both public and private in Bangladesh. There are also vocational and training institutions that cater skill requirements in different sectors of the economy. Unfortunately, external efficiency is a poor match in many instances. A recent newspaper report] catalogued those sixteen hospitals could not use essential medical equipment such as X-ray, ventilator, ultra sonogram, ECG, culture incubator, autoclave machine and hot air oven for lack of skilled manpower. Even an ambulance was lying idle because of a lack of skilled driver. An ICU unit in a district could not be functional because of lack of skilled technicians though there are a glut of general graduates with lack of basic functional and technical skills.
The requirement is to tailor the education system so that it meets both the internal and external efficiency. The current practice of patronizing general education may lead to an avalanche of unemployable graduates and eventually in political and economic chaos in future.
The writer is the Treasurer and a Professor, School of Business and Economics, United International University
