Uncreative Schooling, Part 1
Beginning in the 1960s, Trinidad and Tobago has had mass education. There have been more schools - primary, secondary, and post-secondary; there have been more and more teachers, and more trained ones as well; there has been greater access by children to schooling; and a good number of them have been emerging with better and better certification. But have the products of our education system been materially improving our economy?
The evidence suggests that they have not, essentially because the system has not been preparing them to do so. This is an alarming conclusion when you pause and reflect on it. It asks us to believe that after four decades of mass education involving the expenditure of billions of dollars on policy, plant, knowledge providers, and knowledge recipients, we can hardly make any link between that enterprise and the national economy. How can that be?
The system now provides almost full access by the population to primary and secondary schooling but dramatically reduced access to post-secondary schooling and training. It starts out with about 45 percent of children aged 3 to 4 years in early childhood care and education centres, then moves to over 95 percent of our children in primary school, then to about 95 percent of them in secondary school up to Form 5 (which figure will reduce, via dropout, to about 60 percent), then to some 15 percent in Form 6, then to about 7 percent at the university. A lot of the dropouts and a smaller proportion of the secondary graduates go to YTEPP and other youth development and apprenticeship centres for skills-based training. Some 8000 students are enrolled in technical and vocational schools. And an unknown number of persons are accessing courses in business management, information technology, accounting, law, and human resource development, among others, at a variety of post-secondary institutions.
But when these persons get into the job market and into economic enterprises, do they materially improve the general economy?
To begin to know the answer, we have to look to see if they have innovated and what the innovations are. But when we look, we find very few innovations, and it becomes clear to us that there is merit in 1) dividing the concept of education into the components of schooling and training, 2) holding that it is training far more than schooling that leads to economic innovations, and 3) holding that the education system, by and large, does not produce people who materially improve the economy.
What the system does fairly well is to move people from one level/stage of schooling to another, equipping them with literacy, numeracy, and graphicacy skills and with a broader conscious cognition. In the process, it certifies them to enter the world of work, but it does very little to train them to innovate for the competitive creation of wealth. Indeed, the most cursory observation of the system in the context of social integration will reveal that it is generally those who are trained in particular job- and work-related skills, and not those who are schooled in the traditional academic subjects, who innovate for wealth creation.
In other words, those who are trained in skills like food catering, dressmaking, tailoring, construction/carpentry/joinery, metal work and fabrication, electrical installation, plumbing, air conditioning, refrigeration, computer programming, graphic design, etc., have a tremendous capacity for serious wealth creation. Those who are literate, numerate, and graphicate go on into the public, teaching, legal, accounting, medical services and similar types of service, but as a rule they are not innovative in a wealth-creating way even though they may hold jobs that are better-paying than those trained in the skills that are potentially more wealth-creating.
But the matter is more serious than that. When we look at the economy for the sectors that create significant wealth, we find sectors such as music which is driven by people who were generally the poorly schooled. That is, they did not move from level to level throughout the system to become literate or numerate or graphicate. Think, for example, of our artists. Think of calypsonians and soca and chutney artists. Consider their musical innovations over the years, how they have built the economy, and how they have contributed to building the economy. The calypso and soca industry is a billion-dollar one, but where is the schooling system in it?
There is no course or subject in the curriculum that teaches students how to create calypso or soca music - how to select effective themes, how to compose lyrics on those themes, how to write Creole (the language of calypso) with an alphabetic system, how to analyse and parse Creole, how to exploit the poetic capacity of the language, inter alia. Calypso innovation is all tacit indigenous knowledge not formally valued by the education system. And look at how far it has reached both artistically and economically!
If, exploited by mostly the poorly schooled, it has created that kind of value, what heights might it reach if it were incorporated into the curriculum?
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