Published in Mtimes 13-20 September 2018
The five students of RCC, the laureates of the Omnicane award on the theme “Enn sel lepep, Enn sel nation”, question and challenge us on the free education system, inter alia. “ Il y a beaucoup de parents qui peuvent payer. D’ailleurs, ils payent bien les leçons particulières. L’argent ainsi économisé pourrait être consacré aux plus nécessiteux. De même on aurait du prévoir le Wi-Fi gratuit à ceux qui n’ont pas de connexion la maison….”
Free education has served us well over the past five decades especially in terms of access, in improving our mean years of schooling, in enrolment in higher education and female education and in reducing socioeconomic inequality. But the education system has begun to falter for quite some time now in terms of overall efficiency and effectiveness. Nothing happens overnight. It is difficult to uncover, measure and therefore analyze the total impact of the country’s educational policies- overly free education system, school discipline, messages of overindulgence, parents responsibility, values system, teacher training, teachers’ salary, private tuition, teacher selection process, etc- that have led to such a state of affairs. But everyone agrees that we cannot continue with such an outdated system which has failed to bring out our students’ talent and potential and inspire them to life-long learning while meeting the country’s future needs.
Today a variety of trends are utterly reshaping the education landscape. (24/7 access to online teaching, learning and discovery environments, life-long learning). The budget for education will be rising in the near future to meet these challenges of the worldwide revolution in the education system oriented towards new teaching methodology and technology. There will be increasing risks that the overly free education, including free transport, free exams, free stationeries-may end up being very costly. In the sense that Government will not be able to fully support the public schools; quality will continue plunging and the state system will become dysfunctional and most of the products of these state schools will be misfits when they get out into the real world. Government schools will become reserves for children at the very bottom of our social ladder while private schools will thrive providing a quality education for the elite. (This is what we seem to be experiencing in the health sector- a wanton deteriorating public health but improving private health).Our free public schools will only be trapping generations of students at the margins of society and locking them out of the economy.
This is what our bright youthful Omnicane award winners have tried to warn us about, oblivious of the reactions of our politicians, the hardcore supporters of the welfare state and some of our obstinate leftists. Underlying such an education system subsisting, in parallel with the insidious private tuition, is the fact that Government has been subsiding the elite and with the ongoing cosmetic reform of the system, it is undeniable that the latter feels that it is no longer serving its purpose and cares the least about its gradual decay. They are encouraging more and more private schools to pop up across the nation, giving well to do families an alternative to public education.
It will no longer be feasible to continue providing wholly free education from general taxation. The salvation of free education and its public schools lies in giving more fiscal space to Government to allow it to invest heavily in overhauling the education system to meet the above-mentioned challenges. This will require that policymakers, business leaders and pedagogues a) rededicate themselves to creating a more flexible system, including improving efficiency and effectiveness, b) do away with some of the freebies of our education system and c) introduce measures aimed at cost sharing with parents and students (exempting those on the social register) so that education funding can be supplemented by sources other than government.
