Waigani education planners

tackle pitfalls in PNG

A rural bias primary school, with food gardens, piggery and poultry run, was established on the Gazelle Peninsula (PNG) during the 19505.

It found no favour with the villagers who demanded for their children a school like the others in the country, “the same as in Australia”. Other attempts by the Australian adminis tration to evolve an education sys tem meeting Papua New Guinea’s needs failed, too.

The Education Department has made a number of changes since then, particularly in syllabi and materials, but the system still bears the Australian stamp and is under growing challenge by the nation’s teachers and students, politicians and village leaders.

The 1974-75 expenditure of $53.8 million on education—l 6.7 per cent of the nation’s budget—provides schooling for but 50 per cent of primary-aged children and 17 per cent of secondary-aged children.

There is a high pushout and dropout rate; many school leavers cannot find jobs, and some of the inevitable malaise of rapid urbanisation is being blamed on the education system, Alkan Tololo, director of educa tion, told the eighth Waigani Seminar in 1974 that the Western-type education is still not well understood, “even by many of the comparatively well-educated persons whose deci sions affect the future of our coun try”. The problem of two-way com munication between decision-makers and people bedevils education no less than other facets of life at all levels. It is questionable, though, whether ‘de-schooling’ and other radical changes advocated by foreign academics like Illich and tried by some teachers, eg Hemmes at Kokglamp near Mount Hagen, can do more than solve micro-level problems.

Other developing countries have found that formal Western-type education is the most important single factor in the monetisation of the rural sector (and achievement of much of the nation’s programme depends upon rural modernisation).

As Professor Philip Foster points out in one of the 59 papers in Education in Melanesia, education policies need to be based on the market, not run counter to it. People do not send their children to school

for the good of the nation, they send them there for their own good, and the government therefore needs to “capitalise on the selfish motivations of individuals for the ultimate bene fit of all”.

Formal education is virtually the only means of access to the modern occupational structure which, with its corpus of knowledge and tech niques, has to be developed if the new nation is to hold its own against others. Because social and health services, agricultural and business extension, public works, and many other activities mainly depend, or ought to depend, upon the govern ment’s revenue and loan-raising, many people believe that it is the education system’s prime function to maximise economic returns within the framework of national policies.

However, as Foster warns, “edu cational policies that are economic ally rational may well turn out to be politically disastrous given the situ ation in many less-developed coun tries”. Waigani’s policy makers have to tread the middle ground if education policy is not to increase dependence upon foreign aid or to cause drastic reduction in the popu lation’s material well-being.

Some of the papers in this volume are for the specialist but most are of interest and value to anyone concerned with the totality of national development. Straight forward papers like those by Nelson Giraure, Alan Isoaimu, Dus Mapun and Renagi Lohia speak to poli ticians, other leaders and the general public as much as to educators. They seek an education system which in fluences the changes in culture and technology. Several of the technical papers, eg Paliau Lukas’ Look at manpower development and edu cation, and J. D. Conroy’s Model of educational expansion and un employment, are concerned with the end product.

In all, this volume indicates that the Eighth Waigani Seminar has been a worthy successor of the earlier ones; it has made for better-informed participants in the never-ending debate about education and so con tributed to the nation’s development.

Harry Jackman

(Education In Melanesia, Edited By

J. Brammall and R. May. Published by ANU Press, Canberra. $6.95).