What are we waiting for?

: the objectives of higher education

Sivamohan Sumathy, Danesh Karunanayke and Shamala Kumar

The attack on education What we need to do now is to clarify our aims and then to form a pressure group perhaps the Council for the Protection, not of Rural England, but of British Universities. This is Keith Thomas at a public lecture in London along with Michael Wood, on Universities Under Attack.

Is there are an attack on universities world wide? If so, how is it taking place, this attack? This attack is taking place world wide with funding cuts, introduction of tuition and tuition hikes, funding cuts for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the continual emphasis on providing an education that is not internationalist in outlook, but is about developing skills. In Sri Lanka, we are faced with a two pronged attack on Universities. One is in the name of , Higher Education Quality Assurance,
Accreditation and Quality Framework Bill. Though we may not know of its contents,

as yet, (and why have we been kept in the dark?), we are quite certain it contains really draconian clauses that will curb our sense of autonomy in the university system.

Secondly, poor investment is combined with the conceptual attack on the university system. We have through the years demanded greater investment which would to a great extent solve some of the crucial ills pervading the university system. But that runs counter to the liberalizing agendas that are dominant today. These are the immediate and urgent questions that we need to place in front of ourselves, as we ponder the question of Education, Higher Education and its objectives

Principles of Education and our mandate Within this globalist/internationalist context, we must begin to plot a programme of what we expect from the enterprise, the (ad)venture of education. Let me begin with what I shall call the five principles of a general policy of education. 1. Individually and in a sense universally, education helps the individual make sense of the world around her.

2. At the social level, education prepares somebody to be part of the socio political dynamics of a country; be part of productive activity, providing intellectual, bureaucratic, management leadership and in general be part of the labour force of economic and social production. Does education then serve to maintain the status quo as a study of the history of western educational systems and any system in the world will suggest, interpellating the individual as a subject/citizen into the state and the global/international apparatus?

3. Produce conscious agents of change who will become part of a critical mass of intellectual activity, initiating, complementing political activity at multiple fronts. For our purposes, tied to this is the idea of education as a democratizing act. Education as a democratizing act is etched in our postcolonial memory, as it provided social mobility for many who had been left out of historys progress. Yet, education as a democratizing act does not happen automatically. It acts in tandem with education serving the interests of many and the masses of people, while at the same time, enshrining the ideals of democracy and social justice in its curriculum and method. In other words, carving out a praxis of liberation.

4. A further elaboration of 3 above would be the subalternist approach, where education serves to highlight, open up spaces and also insert the marginalized within the discourse of power, class, gender and other forms of social relations. This would contest and act counter-hegmonically to that of point 3.

5. The intertwined operations of all five or some of the above interpellate the individual as a subject/citizen within the nation state, bestowing upon him/her a subordinate or contrary consciousness as citizen, patriot, male/female, rebel, dissenter, marginalized, dominant, privileged and/or underclass.

If education is to help us make sense of the world, and thereby create subjects/citizens, then the principles shaping educational reforms have to be broad and empowering. We should be enabled in order to take care of it, to intervene in decision making, to produce ideas, to establish dialogue; in order to change the course of policy and other developments. A thought out programme of education, philosophy, curriculum and training of teachers needs to be done without fail, so that short and long term aims are achieved. This has to happen in tandem with other policies of economy and political power sharing by the people. These overall principles should be borne in mind in the undertaking of any reforms. Instead, to make over policy, planning and the shaping of the philosophy of education to economist agendas that serve the interests of a corporate class will lead to social and political crises. At the end of it all, all that we can say is that a consultative mechanism be adopted to decide on the objectives of education. The objective of higher education is to produce thinkers and actors in a variety of ways, contributing to the health of the country and the world at large. This has to be considered along with a study and analysis of relations of power as they operate within society and the ends that education serves. Ultimately, education is for the building of a just and democratic society.

How can one/we realize these principles? How are they to becomes operational? Our mandate as responsible actors, working within the system is to elaborate upon and explore the many meanings of education and their salience. And I outline here, what I see as two cardinal issues that are a MUST, if we are to maintain quality,

independence and the true liberatory meaning of education in Sri Lanka. Higher Education should lay the framework for this.

1. Education as a democratizing act 2. Education as socially relevant and meaningful

Firstly, Point 1: education as a democratizing act is intertwined with the idea of making this very powerful tool, weapon accessible to a large number of people, sections that are left out of decision making, power sharing operations. For any true democracy this is a must. And we see this being thwarted today. We shall hold onto the idea of free education here.

Point 2: Free education is also about freedom. It is not merely about not levying fees. For education to be meaningful we need to think about it as something that operates in a level playing field. To this day, despite several attempts to influence, higher education, has remained independent. The structures of higher education have remained fairly independent. Of course there had been assaults, from both the state and from non state actors which have tried to shape too narrowly and parochially the parameters of education. But today, what we are confronted with is frightening. We are facing the dangerous prospect of administrative and governing authorities, in tandem with global imperialist forces like the World Bank taking some really draconian measures.

History: We have a rich history of this development. For the postcolonial state of Sri Lanka, education was a cornerstone of economic and social development. Even before independence the state invested in education, making schooling mandatory and making it available to most if not all. Education was declared free, and the children of the colonized could go to school in their own locality, go to university and study in their own language. This led to great social mobility resulting in a small but steadily growing middle class, drawn from the non elite classes, while a small upper class still held sway. But education also came to be seen as the pivotal point for social mobility. Prior to the 1944 reforms, the Handessa Rural Education Scheme (1932) initiated under the first Minister of Education C.W.W. Kannangara gave access to information and skills that were important to survival and skills such as in agriculture that would allow them to be useful self employable citizens of the country were the preliminary focus. The scheme also had literature, art, and music as part of the curriculum. This scheme however was abandoned as the view that it did not allow social mobility of the rural (poor) through an academically oriented education gained ascendence. The Kannangara reforms of 1944 made education with an academic curriculum, with a focus on traditional academic subjects, such as language and mathematics, and value-based subjects, such as religion, accessible to all. A goal, at least a proximal goal, of these reforms seems to have been an attempt to equalize access to education, as for example the change of the medium of instruction from English to Sinhala and Tamil. It also came to be understood as an act of democracy for many as the country sought (at least rhetorically) de colonize its future. An

interesting debate in this regard is that between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Dubois about education for black people in reconstruction America. Again, Antonio Gramsci stresses the need for a sound formal education in the traditional disciplines for the people so that they would be equipped with the tools to fight the masters. All in all, free education as it stands now is a charged political issue, for it embodies one of the few palpable results of independence where the general mass of people feel a measure of accommodation and fulfillment of their aspirations.

Current Global Trends; political, economic and social The debate on education and higher education today is an outcome of what has been seen as trends set in motion by globalization and the increased crises within education itself as it has not addressed the needs of an increasingly empowered population. Today we suspect we are in an accelerated programme of liberalization of education, where education comes within the purview of market forces and is considered vulnerable to it. Repeated crises within education and the debates on the social relevance of current educational practice and the need for reform have necessitated a response by the state, which has been quick to pull out the neo liberal carrot and stick at one and the same time as the panacea for all ills. Dominant thinking today is largely driven by donor funding, World Bank and private enterprise concerns. Within the neo liberal logic, what the country needs to do is provide a service class for investment capital and a mobile labour that would be transnational. Hence, the stress

on IT, communication, management skills etc. We summarize below some of the key arguments put forward by those advocating liberalization of higher education.

Neo-liberalist strategies for educational reform bring together persons from seemingly widely disparate groups, from the ultra nationalist JHU to adherents of globalist-laissez-faire-World-Bank-theology. Instead of human agency one hears the mantra of human capital. Economist predictions replace economic analyses, as political economic research gives way to statistical surveys, and compartmentalized empirical studies take on a priori the values and determinations of market ethics. The piecemeal empiricism of these studies is predicated on how the market functions in the fantasy world of free trade and free exchange of goods. When it comes to a consideration of education, this economism becomes acutely dangerous for: a) it makes education a commodity where it cannot be; b) market forces, even when they are predicted accurately (and we all know they are not for the most part) are seen as constant and lasting for whole epochs; c) instead of adopting a political approach (where class and other social factors, the relations between state and society etc. come into play) it premises itself on the foundational myths of corporatism.

1. Education that produced employable graduates in a globally competitive environment. 2. Education as a means of producing economic growth

3. Educational institutes, to be effective, must be subject to market forces.

4. Therefore, educational institutions need to be managed in a manner similar to

other participants in the global market. 5. Education is seen as a private good rather than as a process shared by and claimed by the people on the public domain. Thus, the State has fewer obligations to provide education.

Within this trend setting agenda, education too, in its crudest form comes to be seen as a commodity, as part of economic activity in the narrow sense, of capital investment and trade. The tendency to look upon education as a commodity is in sharp contrast to the idea of education as a democratizing act, where education is seen as a process and is tied to initiating ideas, innovation, mobilization of people, empowerment and the general well being of the people. Pedagogically speaking, life skills gain ascendance over sharing of knowledge and dialogue. It is information based, imparting the banking method of education that Paulo Friere deplored so much in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed as against generation of ideas arrived at through dialogue.

These views on education and training have gained considerable currency in many different quarters (including the academia, to an extent). An increasingly anxious populace, worried about the future of their children are being compelled to accept them, (un)willingly. The Tara de Mel reforms of 1998 could be seen, (with caution

of course) as the first step toward examining and bringing in reforms that would overtly cater to neo liberal policies. It shifted the emphasis from knowledge and dialogue to student centered learning and skills acquisition.

Sri Lanka as a Knowledge Hub: At present the most vocal rhetorical gesture of the the governments programme on education is the slogan: Sri Lanka as a Knowledge Hub. The Ministry of Higher education has repeatedly asserted its aim to turn Sri Lanka into a centre of excellence and a knowledge hub of Asia. Though one could endlessly argue over the meaning of what this could potentially mean, where policy makers are concerned, it means little more than the rejoinder to be a service provider to an as yet illusory corporate sector, providing it with the necessary intellectual and skilled labour, like IT and management professionals. It has more to do with the policy of economic growth than of any commitment to broadening or deepening the imparting of knowledge/education in the region. The knowledge hub notion, as conceived by the government, sees education as a profit making venture, making it vulnerable to shifting market alliances, emphases, vulnerabilities and crises.

There is something philosophically and pedagogically amiss in looking upon education as pure and simple economic gain. There is an inherent contradiction nestling within this conceptualization of knowledge. Knowledge is taken to be some kind of distilled product, a commodity, which can be packaged in order to be sold on

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the market. The idea that this package of knowledge can be arbitrarily attached to market forces runs contrary to the educational principle that sees knowledge as a dynamic socio-cultural phenomenon or process which is collectively shared and not possessed by isolated, atomized individuals. Institutionally speaking, education is a cluster of disciplines, which complement each other in a multiculturalist sense. Educational institutions, at their most basic, whether they be schools or universities, function as sites where A and B together engage in the expansion of their own and societys horizons; they do not and cannot function as commodity producers at any time. To put it more simply, a university exists and functions as a whole and not as an aggregate of subjects. For the MoHE, World Bank experts and economist policy makers, knowledge is something that can be produced in a factory, on the assembly line and as discrete items. The current emphasis on English and IT, tagged as life skills, speak to this. Pedagogically too it is a faulty notion. Neither English nor IT can function as single and singularly derived subjects. They are part of a curriculum. I am an English teacher (of sorts). I know that one cannot teach English, either as a written or spoken language, as an isolated element. To buttress the study of English as a language, there needs to be studies of history, geography, of society and of the sciences going on at the same time. That is what university education is. But not realizing this, the government, its apologists and industrialists look at these disciplines as those necessitated by the demands of the market.

For the MoHE, improving university standards means turning the university system into a competitor in the open market, undermining the pedagogical principles on

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which an educational institution should be run. Let me quote from the relevant section on higher education of the Central Bank report:

While promoting foreign investment in the higher education sector in the country, it is important to improve the existing university education system. In doing so, due to the limited fiscal space, it is important to explore alternative sources of funding for higher education of a greater quality. For this purpose, the existing administrative and financial regulations would need to be reviewed and suitably amended without compromising academic standards, quality and examination integrity. Though public universities enjoy a considerable level of autonomy, administrative constraints could result in reducing revenue generated through consultancy, research activities and study programmes. Entrepreneurial orientation of university education is another possible avenue for alternative financing as well as attracting foreign students from other countries. Even with the expansion of the private general education system in the country, proper criteria are yet to be set up to admit students of private education institutions into public universities via a suitable cost sharing mechanism. Simultaneously, it is important to introduce a quality assurance rating system to make public universities competitive which in turn would spur academic and research excellence in public universities. (76-77)

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MoHEs response to the problems assailing university education and the institutions themselves is without any true value. And it is a dangerous response. Its attempt to turn universities into profit-making institutions would undo the bottomline of standards that had been jealously guarded over the decades by the institutions. Money making consultancies in which the academic staff would be forced to take part in cannot be considered research. If the Minister and the planners think that consultancies are research, they demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of the basic principles of research and pedagogy. An entrepreneurial orientation as prompted by MoHE, would erode into the quality of education administered; quantity would be valued and promoted at the expense of quality of research and teaching. Teaching too would suffer greatly in the rat race to generate funds. In the end, education as a whole would suffer.

Even while neo liberal agendas in every aspect, city beautification, slum clearance, accelerated tourism projects, leasing of land to multi national corporations, are being rammed down our throats, alarm bells are ringing elsewhere, of repeated crises in finance capital stability and the stability of market forces on the global scene. Again and again, we are being warned by educationists and social reformers elsewhere, that neo liberal reforms have only served to devalue educational achievements, have dumbed down education and brought on general social cohesion and upheavals. There is a host of material on the way the neo liberal agenda is shaping curriculum and pedgagoy across the world to the detriment to educational standards and the long

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term empowering of people. Some of those specifically working on education, in American and Third world situations, like J. C. Aggarwal (India) Cary Nelson (USA), Carriveros (Chile), Michael Oakeshott (Britain), to cite just a handful among hundreds of scholars, have remarked upon this. According to Mellissa Benn in her new book School Wars: the Battle for Britains Education, the current educational policies of the British government are privileging the rich more and more. Henry Giroux in The Terror of Neo Liberalism. Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy. demonstrates how neo liberal policies are designed to enhance possibilities for a few against that of a larger populace, particularly the marginalized sections.

Our Immediate concern and Demand: greater state investment The immediate and urgent question facing us as educationists today is poor state investment in education. The hypocrisy of the government should be called to task when it says, University education in Sri Lanka, which is mainly a public sector monopoly, suffers from both, the inability to meet demand and failure to supply a quality education compatible with labour market requirements. (Central Bank Report, 75-76). When government spending on education is a meagre 1. 9% of the GDP of which its expenditure on higher education is even less, it is no wonder that that the university sector is unable to meet its demand. University academics have made repeated appeals to the government to raise expenditure on education to at least 6% of the GDP. Instead of responding to that, the government spends enormous amounts on leadership training of entrants to the university conducted by the military

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and on other fringe programmes. The public has the right to demand from the government an answer to these legitimate questions: Why is spending on education so low compared to that on defence? Why are the universities compelled to employ an expensive security firm, when

there are so many other educational priorities? Why is the state intent on spending Rs. 200 million on a three-week leadership

training for incoming students and much more on the three month pre orientation programme (POP), generally understood to be at an expense of Rs. 900 million, in which the universities as institutions have no role to play? There is a multitude of similar questions that could be asked challenging the state to increase its spending on education and higher education.

In its recent trade union action, FUTA demanded a minimum of 6% of the GDP as state expenditure on education. If this is achieved the university system would be able to expand on its intake, update its resources, increase cadre positions and give better quality education. Instead, the government is running state-funded public education to the ground, decisively and stealthily. The most inimical of the MoHEs pronouncements to quality and independence of the university system is that pertaining to its increasing control of curricular and pedagogical activities of the University. Though public universities enjoy a considerable level of autonomy, administrative constraints could result in reducing revenue generated through consultancy, research activities and study programmes. Entrepreneurial orientation of

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university education is another possible avenue for alternative financing as well as attracting foreign students from other countries. (77)

A sure way of reducing quality is to turn Universities into money spinners. A third world country like Sri Lanka, which has relied for so long on providing a somewhat standard education, one that is for the most part on par with internationally accredited universities cannot afford to become entrepreneurial institutions. That would be educational and social suicide. A long term perspective In responding to the challenges facing us today, particularly with regard to higher education, we need to take into account, the five theoretical positions and operations outlined above. This is particularly so in the case of Higher Education. Higher education, purportedly, sets the agenda, trends, and guiding principles for formal education in the global and national contexts. Today, with the neo liberal agenda overrunning the world we are faced with rethinking the principles that have shaped higher education in the country upto now(sort of); but in doing so we need to keep sight of the role of higher education and its contrary purposes as they impact on the lives of ordinary people. We need to keep in sharp focus the idea of education as a democratizing act. We need to go back to the idea of education as a liberating tooll, socially meaningful and internationalist in outlook

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