Playing into priviligentia hands

EDUCATION in the Pacific Islands has taken a new and strange turn everyone wants a university for his own island.

This, in spite of the fact that a university is an immense investment in terms of monetary and, or, intellectual capital.

Many Islanders have had university education yet very few really understand how a university ticks, and much less how to set up one.

The belief that money is the one key to tertiary education development, nay, to every type of development, is also widespread in the Islands. It is part of the so-called modernist position.

But money alone can never guarantee quality or lasting benefit. Because it is a tool it can only be used, and so its effect is determined entirely by external factors, especially the good judgment or folly of the user. In fact there are Island groups which have been “blessed” with money.

Yet it is extremely doubtful whether quality of life is necessarily better in them than in the others. Viewed from a wider, longer-range perspective, what can the touristy, not even-skin-deep culture of a Hawaii, or misfortune-ridden, essentially despairing one of a Nauru, offer our grandchildren in terms of a power for discernment or permanent social and cultural gains? If they are to teach, it shall only be by negative example.

Similarly with university development in the Islands. The most notable examples are University of the South Pacific (USPj, University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG), and the new French university.

They were set up in the Islands like buildings being erected but pre-fabricated by metropolitan designers of highly doubtful competence in matters academic, i.e. bureaucrats, politicians, and Big Business interests. The Islanders, however, with their time-hallowed phobia for speed, would be more at home with institutions which grow like trees from a seed, but making sure, of course, that the seeds are the right ones what thougroweth thou verily shall reap.

And money has been amply poured into these three schools.

But apart from vague schemes for economic development, what

provisions have they in their books, for real intellectual, or even moral improvement in the broadest sense of the term?

On the other hand what can we expect from establishments which are primarily weapons of the politically powerful within the Island communities, apparatuses for the maintenance of the status quo in the island world and the hegemony of metropolitan powers over same? We must face it: the problems of the Islands both internal and external are ultimately political not economic i.e. they relate to the distribution of Dower and rights within the Island societies diemselves and between the Islands and their brmer colonial masters.

Largely from economic and logistical xmsiderations the regional character of these hree universities, especially the USP, has :ome under fire. _,,The S°l omon Islanders, complaining that dji is the only real beneficiary of USP, have,

or some time, been talking about establishing their own miversity. The Roman Catholics there, in the meantime, have et up the Divine Word Institute, a school that promises to be >f consequence in the future.

And at PNG, the Pacific Adventist College is providing an

The Islands

alternative option for people requiring tertiary education in that country.

Western Samoa, another grumbling member of the USP region, has now put the National University of Western Samoa on the tracks. Tonga is talking about following suit soon.

In Tonga also PACU (Pacific-Asia Christian University) threatens to open its doors to students in the immediate future, though its main concern may be the training of young missionaries.

And the institution where I work, ‘Atenisi Institute, which has a tertiary part, has just celebrated its Silver Jubilee. These institutions taken together provide a measure of the Islanders’ ardour for education at the highest level.

There is, however, a fundamental flaw in the education of Pacific peoples. They conceive education from a purely utilitarian standpoint. This, however, is not peculiar to the Pacific. Pacific “thinking” on education has always been influenced by ideas from far and wide, but arriving in the Islands via Australia and especially New Zealand.

A specially vicious ethos called modernisation-development theory is now being hailed as the most laudable foundation for educational development in both New Zealand and the Islands.

The nation maintains that education is there solely to raise the GNP so that teachers’ roles consist of nothing but the passing-on of productive skills to students who must concen trate only on mastering the techniques so imparted. It is an extremely deceptive concept because it conducts a false diagnosis of the problems of I bird World Countries bv setting the cart before the horse.

In emphasising economic needs it strengthens, and plays into, the hands of the powers that be and traditional priviligentia who proceed to parrot the developmental rhetoric thus sustaining the fantasies of the have-nots in those communities who continually dream of material plenty. 1 he originators of modernisation ideas have no sense of history or social facts. They have no understanding of education as a historical movement with distinct characters of

its own. They exhibit no appreciation at all of the inevitability of conflict and change, and the complexity and permanence of social struggle.

They present the matter as simplicity itself, that if only a few simple facts c.g. economic

growth, require technological development

which requires technical skills which requires teachers to transfer them, are mastered, all will be well.

But this historical and illiberal doctrine has been the basis of educational policies of the islands in the last two decades or so, enabling politicians and governments to saddle edu cators and schools with responsibility for social ills or economic backwardness.

And so, although the present clamour for more tertiary institutions in the Islands has merit, I cannot but be sad about it all for they will be modelled on UPNG, USP, and the French university, bastions of technical functional education in the islands and

instruments for the protection of privilege, ancestral status, and political influence.

If Pacific people do not wake up to themselves, a multitude of new higher educational institutions will be a force for dull conservatism bent on the elevation of crudeness and worship of mediocrity. q

Futa

Helu