A new vision of education6

Friday, 7 August 2009 | Filed under Education

For some time now, I have believed that we should redefine what it means to be educated, who gets to be educated and how young people are educated to meet the needs of a fast changing world.

I have felt that the education system the British left behind in all the Commonwealth countries — 6 years in primary school, 5 to 7 years in secondary school and followed by tertiary education — is at odds with the reality of life for most of the world.

Many governments of the Commonwealth adopted the British system of education wholesale even after independence because the systems and methodologies were already in place.

It was a one-size-fits-all solution that worked at that time. But the British system, as good as it was, is not applicable to many Commonwealth countries that are struggling to develop.

It does not take into account the differing socio-economic development stages of the countries.

It does not take into account that other than a colonial past, most of these countries had little in common in terms of heritage and traditions with the West. What we have in common is our history, our bonds to Great Britain and the legacy of the English language.

It does not take into account that in many parts of the Commonwealth, a Western-style education is accessible only to the wealthy and the privileged — in a nutshell, the elite.

Where some countries have gone wrong, I believe, is that when it became increasingly clear that this did not address their peculiar circumstances, the common reaction was to throw more money after the ‘problem’ in the hope that it would either be solved or go away.

But problems don’t go away; they fester and become bigger problems.

The result is worsening the disparity between rich and poor people within a country.

Wealth disparity dividing the world

This world is a very unequal place.

On the planet are 6.7 billion people but only about 900 million live in the 57 countries termed as developed or industralised. In other words, these 900 million live in the richer part of the world.

In contrast, nearly 6 billion people live in the developing world.

The developing world's people generally have a much lower standard of living. They have less access to education and healthcare facilities than people in high income countries.

The World Bank informs us that, in the developing world, more than one billion people currently live below the poverty line, earning less than US$1 per day.

That paltry sum means they are unable to get adequate and nutritious food for themselves and their families.

And that reduces their capacity to fight their way out of poverty – even if they are offered the opportunity, which, for most of them, is also hard to come by.

Less than 40 percent of children of school going age in developing countries are enrolled in schools. And of those who get enrolled, 50 percent drop out after just 6 years of primary education.

The total wealth of the world's 8.6 million millionaires is worth US$32.8 trillion, more than half of the world’s GDP of US$60 trillion. And more than half of these millionaires come from just three countries — the United States, Japan and Germany.

The world's 1,125 billionaires, according to Forbes, were worth a total of US$4.4 trillion in 2008 – an increase of 26 percent from the year before. Astonishingly, their combined wealth was almost equal to the GDP of Japan, the second largest economy in the world.

This wealth divide will widen since populations in developing countries are growing much faster than populations in developed countries.

Advanced nations are pulling away to new levels while the developing world struggles to keep pace.

Unless we find ways to bridge this divide between the rich and poor nations, and do it quickly, a new form of apartheid may spread across the world.

Brain drain weakens poor countries

The capacity of poor countries to pull themselves out of poverty is weakened by severe brain drain.

Because their governments are cash strapped and unable to make the public investments needed to create sufficient employment opportunities, these countries lose their trained human capital to the rich economies.

Since the best brains would go to where they could do their best work, it is inevitable for the advanced nations with their better employment, higher incomes and a superior quality of life to attract the best talents.

Many of the brightest from the poorest countries who are sent to the advanced countries to further their education never go home, and are lost to the rich countries.

Malaysia is a victim of the migration of talents offshore.

About 30,000 Malaysians with tertiary education are currently working in Europe.

Tens of thousands of other Malaysians are contributing their skills and knowledge in countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.

There are reportedly more African scientists and engineers working in the United States than in the entire African continent.

The result of this brain drain is greater inequality between the developing and the developed countries in talents essential to grow economies, improve education and create job opportunities that lift the standard of living.

ICT deepening the divide

The new buzzword in the field of training and education today is ICT. Wherever we go, we see ICT being held up as the solution to power up the economy, upgrade human capital and eradicate poverty.

Bring ICT in and a country will become prosperous, so it is claimed.

So in many parts of the developing world, the focus of governments over the last 10 years has been to equip people with ICT skills because many saw it as the ‘magic bullet’ that would catapult them into the Information Age.

Unfortunately, most people in poor and developing countries live in very under-developed rural areas where they are usually the last to have any form of infrastructure, never mind access to the internet. ICT has not been the salvation as many had predicted.

When many poor countries, including several Commonwealth countries, have an internet penetration rate of only 1 or 2 or 3%, ICT has instead deepened the divide between the rich and the poor even within countries, let alone the huge gulf between developed countries and countries struggling to develop.

To break out of the trap, they will need money to acquire the knowledge, skills and sophisticated tools, and that is something they do not have.

They will need electric power and the technologies to run the modern tools, and again these means are lacking because their countries do not have the money to provide them.

The technologies of the internet, which have enabled the rich economies to create amazing new wealth, remain a dream to the vast majority of people in the developing world.

Using indigenous knowledge to create jobs

Since education in the poorer countries is not well developed and not universally available, empowerment programmes must be based on a strategy that will get as many people as possible into work that generates an income, and they must be based on knowledge and skills that are indigenous to the rural population, which comprises the bulk of the poor in developing countries.

It must be so if we are to get moving quickly. We must be able to hit the ground running, and not spend years doing studies and putting up buildings!

The rural economy runs on knowledge and skills that are thousands of years old. Adding new knowledge and new skills of the modern era will, undoubtedly, transform the sector to perform more vibrantly.

There must be a focus on development of human capital to rejuvenate the agricultural sector and expand the craft industry.

By introducing modern techniques and technology and skill training, the craft sector can very quickly begin to produce more jobs.

There are no limits to the upside potential of these sectors — in creating jobs, enhancing productivity and stimulating high value-add activities.

The local people should be trained to do what they have been doing for ages and to do them better.

To train them to do something totally new to them will require costly investment in new technologies and new infrastructure.

For many developing countries, this would inevitably mean borrowing funds and falling deeper into the poverty trap.

If developed as an integrated platform, agriculture and the craft industry could create large-scale employment, increase food output and reduce imports, boost the tourism and hospitality sector, increase exports of value-added products and produce human capital that will be able to generate wealth year after year.

Building ‘bridges’ between East and West

This is a time of enormous change for educational institutions globally. They are under pressure to deliver the skills that are increasingly demanded by governments and business as countries seek to take on the challenges and competition created by globalisation.

In the UK, the British themselves are talking about reinventing their educational institutions to make them more inclusive and their brand of education more relevant to today’s world.

They are including more foreign content and recruiting more foreign lecturers.

What has happened is that they are opening up to accepting new interpretations of what education means to different people from different cultural backgrounds and different levels of economic development.

To some degree, Limkokwing University contributed to accelerating the pace of change in the UK by setting up our campus in London, following our expansion into Africa.

Limkokwing London is the first Asian and first Commonwealth country’s university to open a campus in the UK.

Its establishment marked a pioneering endeavour to integrate Asian, African and Western values, traditions, creativity and technology in education; one that will broaden the cultural and intellectual learning experience of the students, and open minds to new ideas and perception.

The new vision of globalised education that we promote also aims to build ‘bridges’ between the East and the West.

Although the East and West are very different in many ways, I see them as the two sides of the same coin.

I believe in creating a two-way traffic in education between Asia and the world. Not one way, with the students heading west but two-way with students heading east too.

It is important to reverse the flow because an education with a Western bias is no longer sufficient in the world today.

With powerful economies rising in the East, such as Japan, China, South Korea and India, a strictly Western-centric education is no longer sufficient even for people living in the West.

If you study and live all your life on only one side of the world, you will know only that one side; you will know only half the story, see only half the picture and miss out on half the opportunities.

Already, the smaller Western countries are working on new trade and investment strategies that take into consideration the shift of economic power from the West to the East.

An education system that nurtures success

We know that the first six years of a child’s life are the most important, a time when their brain and nervous system development are being hard-wired.

We also know that many children are only in school for six years of their lives.

If that is the reality, and we stick to standardised one-size-for-all systems, are we not ignoring the needs of many?

What are we not doing or need to stop doing to make education meaningful or relevant in the poorest countries?

Should we not devise a system where if a person only goes to school for six years, then he or she must at the very least gain the ability to read, write and learn one skill so as to become employable?

Some may argue against fixing what isn’t broken.

It is the nature of people to avoid change. They find comfort in time-tested practices. Breaking the norm is not encouraged.

Basically, many people in education are ignorant of the reality. They need to be educated on what the world is really like.

Many in the West continue to push ‘artificial knowledge’, right up to PhD level, although most people in the world don’t need it.

Yet their views are dominant in the world and their education is deemed to be the ‘gold standard’.

In truth, many in the poor countries only need to learn to read and write, and master a skill that will empower them to be productive.

What we need to do, I feel, is to review, revamp and re-invent the development and delivery of education, allowing for greater flexibility, greater creativity and greater relevancy.

It is time for a new Commonwealth education model to be considered.

One that effectively accommodates the different needs of different countries which are at different stages of development.

One that nurtures, not just instructs; one that finds ways to success for every student.

This reinvention must happen if there is to be transformation so that every young person is purposefully educated, and has a part to play and a stake in moving their country forward.

This I see as an urgent mission.

Urgent because holding on to irrelevant systems and models will continue to serve only a tiny fraction of the populations of the Commonwealth, and further stirring dissent, frustrations and hopelessness — all key ingredients for anger and conflict.