Some thoughts on our elitist education system: The whole education system is skewed towards elitism; all our resources are focussed on producing laureates at the cost of addressing efficiency and equity issues in the system . Now on top of all that, we are now celebrating the failure of the system , how stupid ?
Parents, some top educationists, opinion leaders, present and past politicians, the conformists remain the real drivers of the education rat race and they will be the harder to convert. For e.g back in 2017 , an ex-Minister of Education was trying to convince us that “ In a way, (the laureate system) is tantamount to a form of democratisation of elitism and improvement of the overall quality of education – albeit a slow process. …In its present form, the laureate scheme is not perfect and needs to be revisited and improved. If handled properly, it can still serve some useful purpose. If mishandled, it can be the source of more harm than good….”
Overtime, the quality of education has deteriorated and the competitive system has in no way led to any improvement of the overall quality of education. The Nordic countries have emerged as the new rock stars of global education. They do as little measuring and testing as they can get away with it; there is lower emphasis on "outperforming your neighbor". Everybody is average but they ensure that the average is very high. They make sure that raising the average for the bottom rungs has a profound effect on the overall result. And here we are still bothered about competition and focus mainly on scores of the few at the very top -the Laureate system, our so-called elite.
These Nordic countries are also some of the educational overachievers and are usually placed among the top three finishers in reading, math and science; in some PISA test scores, they are well-placed in science literacy, mathematics and in reading ; in contrast to the the Asian education powerhouses with their drill-heavy teaching methods, they have less long hours, less gruelling homeworks;" the teacher stays with a class from first grade through sixth grade. That way the teacher has years to learn the behaviours of a particular group and tailor the teaching approach accordingly."
Here our competitive ossified education system has doomed the education system to mediocrity. Our schools have trapped generations of students at the margins of society and locked them out of the economy. The quality of public schools has sunk to spectacularly low levels ; the non-star schools/non-academies have become reserves of children at the very bottom of our social ladder. Moreover, it is a totally dysfunctional education system. Most of our products are misfits when they get out into the real world.
Democratisation of elitism and more of meritocracy in our system, you will say ! Yes, the elite advantage-taking system implicitly valorizes meritocratic ideals. Yet meritocracy itself is the bigger problem, and it is crippling the education system. Meritocracy has created a competition that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the elite can win. The abuse is an unpleasant sort of vindication. It reflects how entrenched and widespread are the interests that a reform of the system has to contend with : a complacent and self - serving education establishment, whose ill-deserved privileges it has dedicated himself to removing.
In the last few years, some macroeconomists have focused their research on the issues surrounding economic growth and inequality and social mobility. The World Economic Forum has elaborated an index emphasising all these elements called the “Inclusive Development Index” Of all the OECD countries in the sample, Norway Denmark , Sweden and Finland are ranked among the top ten. These countries display a lower Gini index than most countries-less unequal. The results are very similar for social mobility. (see graph below)
What type of policy explain why inequality and social immobility are so low in Nordic countries, while they are much higher in other countries? The research shows that policies related to education, and more specifically to “elitism in education”, are the main factors explaining this finding. “The differences with regard to elitism in education can explain the differences in mobility and inequality among countries. And indeed, the Nordic countries have on average a lower level of elitism than most countries in the OECD.”
The competitive and stultifying rote education system is failing our children; many have started to feel that the system is rigged , that upward mobility is just a myth; they have started believing that success in life depends more on luck and right circumstances than on effort and they have less trust in our educational institutions that would have allowed them to work their way up the social ladder and out of poverty.
Our only way out is an overhaul of the education system, improving the performance of the educational delivery system and inducting cost effective practices ….A lot needs to be done…in addition to our political parties’ promises on law and order, industry, development, jobs, good governance, freedom from corruption, crime and political interference and more recently a “Moratoire sur les morcellements fonciers” , they must engage in a far-reaching debate on the reform of our education system.
