Education for progressive change
Arguably, the Federation of University Teachers’ Association’s (FUTA) public agitation in 2013 renewed the discussion on education in the public sphere. Even more than the current government’s pledge to gradually increase government spending on education to 6 per cent of GDP—a pledge that made FUTA declare victory—a key triumph of FUTA’s action was to bring a political and one might even say a militant dimension to the debate on education. It has also brought into sharp focus the debate on how education at present is very much a part of the ideological processes that order our society for the better or for the worse.
That education is one of the most fraught and contentious public issues today was evident at the recent 53rd Open Forum of the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) titled, “University Education: A Critical Reflection” that brought to debate seemingly antithetical views on education.
The presentation of ongoing research at CEPA that analyses the link between social mobility and education—served as an apt point of departure. “Learning from our past: Tertiary education in Sri Lanka, 1950-2010” sought to map the historic evolution of the university education and inter-generational mobility of the graduates. The research, based on life histories of a cross-section of university graduates, attempts to encapsulate the gradual change and continuity in Sri Lankan university education and its outcomes. Initially it was envisaged to serve the colonial imperatives.
Although after 1948 there was a greater nationalist bent to education policy, as Ms. Nilakshi De Silva, one of the lead researchers, pointed out Sri Lanka attempted to replicate—at least to a certain extent—the Oxbridge model which she described as “elitist”. However, in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the first youth insurrection, as a means of tackling youth unrest—some might even say to pacify through development—the government implemented a Five Year Plan, which necessitated a shift towards a “manpower approach”. This centered on ensuring that the education system meets the manpower requirements of a country’s growing economy and produce human resources that support social and economic development. In other words, put young people on the road to work rather than revolution. The legacy of this, now strengthened by neo-liberal political economic configurations as some participants argued, brought up the key issue for debate: Are our universities merely centres of vocational training?
It is interesting to note that although according to the CEPA’s research findings, university education has facilitated inter-generational mobility irrespective of decade—meaning graduates perceive that they have achieved higher social status than their parents due to their education—male graduates experience more occupational mobility than their female counterparts. This observation alerts us to the danger of hastily concluding that university education has enabled upward mobility, without qualification, and points to the need of critically analysing the nuances of the way in social mobility is enabled by university education.
To simply say that university education enables social mobility is to dissimulate the inequalities in the way in which mobility is created. These inequalities are often the result of one’s class, caste and gendered position. In other words we need to think critically about the link between university education and social mobility even while making the claim that university education plays a key role in enabling social mobility. Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, from the Open University, championed a critical re-examination of the “discourse” on education. She focused on how people talk about education—undergraduates, graduates, faculty, curricular, etc— and the ideological underpinnings of the way in which the current so called “crisis” in education is conceptualised. Although she stressed the importance of improving the quality of faculty, recruitment policy, and curricular, she draws attention to the necessity of understanding these issues as necessarily stemming from inadequate funding allocated to education.
The so called “crisis” in the university system is by and large conceived as the inability of the university system to produce “employable graduates”. As Dr. Amarasuriya claimed, “prescriptions” such as “strengthening university-industry relations, modernising curricula to meet the needs of the labour market, public private partnerships, internationalisation, promoting more marketable study programmes, encouraging universities to offer financially sustainable and self-financed study programmes, strengthening ICT, soft skills, English among graduates” are proposed as ideologically neutral solutions to the “crisis”. But this approach to education can strip education of its “transformative and political potential”. In this solely utilitarian approach to education, education’s role in fostering critical individuals who can critically and responsibly engage in the democratic process of asserting their citizenship and intellect is neglected. Hence the call for the class room to be a “space of critical pedagogy”. Of particular concern was the emphasis on expanding science and technology studies while limiting the expansion of the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, the question of whether this is connected to the highly gendered nature of the preference for the latter i.e. females significantly outnumbering male students, also emerged.
As a discussant Dr. Harsha Aturupane from the World Bank contested some of the arguments that Dr. Amarasuriya made in her talk. One of his key questions was whether it was unreasonable to expect the graduates to contribute to the nation in economic terms, given that the nation invests its “scarce” resources in education? He also pointed out that it is difficult to sustain the “Oxbridge tradition”, of providing a broad spectrum liberal education owing to the mass rather than elite character of universities these days. Precisely because the students who enter university do not belong to the “leisured class” anymore, it is necessary to produce employable graduates, he argued.
In response Ms. De Silva argued and, Dr Amarasuriya concurred, that the “contribution to the nation” should not be solely gauged in economic terms alone; graduates can and indeed must contribute to the nation by being politically conscious and critically thinking persons. Dr. Aturupane retorted that there are no either/or answers; that the aim of the university education should be to create “employable intellectuals”.
Paulo Freire in his classic text on education, Pedagogy of the Oppressed argues that the goal of education must be the creation of a “critical consciousness”. This critical consciousness derives from “conscientization”, the ability to see the contradictions in our world and to act in order to transform it. It is time for us to rethink education, as a force for progressive change and not just in terms of its economic value. This demands a significant revamp of Sri Lankan education, at all levels, and critical and serious public debates are a good place to start.