Letters To The Editor

Pound foolish: Forgetting the demand side

Dear Sir, The subject of your article “Pennywise ...”(PIM Sept) is more than timely. Thank you for initiating what should become a more public discussion of the issues of education in all Pacific Island Countries (PICs). Although the article described many of the shiny “pennies’ related to edu cation, we need to pay more attention to its dull, but individually more valuable, pound notes, equitable cost sharing and employer participation.

First, equitable cost sharing. Fiji’s pri vate sector-led education system is arguably the best system within the devel oping PICs. A major reason for this is that the communities share the operating costs of primary and secondary schools (such sharing is a common practice with church communities as well as communities and governments throughout North America).

The implication - the cost-sharing formu las used in PICs need to be changed so that more of education’s burdens and rights, rest with local communities and their area of province.

In exchange for giving more responsi

bility to local cultures for their children’s education, national funds can be applied to other forms of education.

Why change the formula? In most PICs, parents and communities see only the sub sidised costs of education. This is artificial and not sustainable. Worse, it results in parents believing that the return they are getting (in terms of their children’s

improved earning potential) on the money

they pay (their own investment) for school fees, etc., is very good. On that heavily subsidised personal level they are of course right. But for society as a whole, these sub sidies have two key negative effects. The first is that parents and students become so addicted to this expectation of (artificially) higher returns that they strongly oppose needed increases in school fees. The sec ond reality is that parents are not involved in looking for the most cost-effective ways to teach their children.

Cost-effective education for PICs will need mechanisms which are less formal than universities or university-focused sec ondary schools. Why? For two reasons.

One, most of our children don’t need such formal, academic, training because the

cash economy is not generating enough jobs for all the youths entering the job mar ket. Two, less formal mechanisms are at least as effective in improving our chil dren’s earnings potential, but they cost less, sometimes a lot less. Less formal mechanisms include ‘continuing educa tion’ (CE, using standard courses as and when a student has the time and money), non-formal education (NFE, less standard ised courses as described in the September issue of Islands Business), and vocational technical training (including apprentice ships).

Cost effective education can even be achieved in formal education. Fiji’s experi ences are not the only ones to show that community involvement in the real costs of education can be a way to make educa tion cost effective. Trial projects undertak en by USAID and others in two African countries in the early 90s revealed that community run schools were able to oper ate for some 20 percent of the cost of gov ernment-dependent schools.

What is most important though, is that the students from those schools performed at or above the average of students at gov ernment dependent schools. Why was this?

The report indicated that the increased parental and community involvement in the children’s education provided students with more of the support and incentives for learning than government dependent

schools provided.

Our nations’ leaders need to recognise that by ‘giving’ a school or classroom to a community, or by giving tuition waivers to students, they are not necessarily helping them (other than helping them to continue a dependency). PIC leaders need to take the ‘hard’ initiative to tell parents that edu cation needs to begin in homes and in com munities, not in national capitals. They need to say, ‘although education is very valuable for both social and economic nation-building, it is more valuable for household economic and community building. Therefore, national governments will do all that they can to help parents and communities to do their jobs, but that they should not be expected to do more than help. This is a ‘hard’ initiative for our lead ers to take because, in doing so they run the risk of antagonising the nascent ‘elites’ that have grown up during the decades of high levels of Cold War-inspired foreign assistance and who, as a result, see such

subsidies for their children as an unearned right. The public needs to recognise this

difficulty and compensate by increasing

their demonstrations of support for a fair and equitable sharing of the costs of edu cation.

While a dependency on subsidised edu cation is found at all school levels, it is most apparent at university. Too often, stu dents from PlC’s are given tuition-free scholarships; many get both tuition and

living allowances.

Often, these scholarships are not linked to performance criteria, so students keep studying regardless of whether they are learning (or what their grades are). Most students’ performance is not sufficient to

justify government paid living allowances;

students should earn these or have them paid by their families and communities.

Second, employer participation. The point raised in the “Pennywise” article about the effects of decreasing budget pri orities for education is relevant, but such decreases are most often due to the need to deal with self-inflicted economic wounds, like a national bank scandal, rather than dealing with any structural adjustment pro gramme.

What is more important, there is anoth er, and vital, aspect which you have over looked: PlC’s schools are supply-driven, not demand-driven.

That is, the suppliers of students (par ents), of teachers (teachers’ training insti tutions), of textbooks etc and so on deter mine the content and curricula of educa tion. Parents believe that the curricula which will get their child to/through col lege are best - but only three to five per cent of PIC youths will complete universi ty. Teacher training and text books follow the models, curricula, paradigms current in production-based economies; those economies need much higher levels of uni versity-educated people.

In the PICs, because the formal, cash economy is not generating enough jobs, half to three quarters of our youths will want or need to leam how to obtain increasing benefits (for increasing popula tions and expectations) from a subsistence economy.

The university-focused, supply side structure is not ‘wrong’: by putting so much of our resources where they cannot be fully used, it is lopsided and unsustain able. A sustainable balance can be obtained

by including the demanders of education in the teams designing educational mecha nisms, content and curricula. These demanders include employers (who want workers who can do needed tasks), con sumers (who want creative entrepreneurs and skilled workers to meet their demands for new or higher quality products), stu dents (who want an education that will help them eam-a-cash or non-cash-living), and communities (which want an increase in their quality of life in return for support ing the education of their children).

It is important to remember that the ‘demanders’ of education must include subsistence agriculture and related basic marketing and value-adding production for rural island resources, as well as care giv ing for island communities.

In addition to having different content implications, the demands of these groups are not constant nor discrete one-off (eg, one course or program) events; they will result in frequent returns to education for short periods for new or updated skills.

This is something that methods such as CE, NEE, and vocational/technical education address. Two, these methods better address ‘supply side’ issues, as people can study as they can afford the time and other costs, thus enabling them to continue to improve their income earning potential, or to main tain it during times of sudden economic shocks.

Our present supply-driven education system’s focus on graduation from univer sity or polytechnic wastes resources in other ways. A university should not be a place to send academically talented youths just to give them something to do, when they can be “doing” at home (and using CE, NEE, and so on) at a lower cost or at a higher profit. We need to direct scholar

ships toward those fields of study that relate to our needs. We need analysts (as Dr Baba indicated) and teachers, even more, we need technical skills such as sci entists and engineers (as Dr. Siwatibau mentioned).

Students wishing to study fields for which there is no present need should not receive scholarships except on exceptional merit. Scholarships should be awarded by

non-partisan, autonomous scholarship

boards comprised primarily of persons nominated by academic institutions employers and donors, with only one or two, ex-officio, government representa tives. This is the way that many Southeast Asian economies (not to mention similar totally private systems in churches and North America) treat their university stu dents.

This means that the students who can not earn a scholarship, nor find a work study program to help them to meet the costs of formal education (or whose fami lies and/communities cannot afford to sup port them in school), will also want to have alternative educational choices. This addi tional demand for alternative education is another reason for shifting our post-prima ry focus to the processes and forms of edu cation mentioned above.

Other education cost-sharing systems have been shown both more cost effective and capable of meeting the demands of both the cash and the subsistence economies. Thus, they would also be a bet ter national investment. Equally important, by including the demand-side of education in its management, students will better see how to earn an income (whether cash or non-cash), or otherwise contribute con structively within their familiar but chang ing environment.

Charles Kick,

Port Vila