Education for Employment

Education for Employment
(Previously published in The Island/Sri Lanka)
Education is, ultimately, the process of acquiring the knowledge and the skills that are required for us to survive as a species. But we humans are too advanced and sophisticated to be satisfied with an education that is just adequate to meet this elementary need. Every human society, except for a few forest dwelling tribes, has an infinity of needs in addition to the very basics of life such as food, clothing, and shelter: accessories for physical comfort, health, entertainment, leisure, travel, schooling for children, and so on. The fulfilment of these needs calls for a workforce with the necessary knowledge and skills to provide the goods and services required. In modern times, an efficient workforce must be equipped with not only basic knowledge and practical skills, but a whole host of other resources such as managerial capacity, organizational finesse, familiarity with information technology, and professional values. It’s a major aim of education to enable the young to acquire these abilities, which qualify them for gainful employment.
Educational reforms introduced since the early 1970’s at least have all taken notice of the general criticism that our education system is not adequately employment oriented. Various curricular improvements have been introduced to address this problem under successive governments, though the problem hasn’t gone away completely. It may be that a government alone cannot solve the problem. The collaboration of the business and industrial sector, and the society at large is vital in this connection. It is heartening to see that there is evidence to show that things are changing in a meaningful way at last. The news item in The Island (07-09-2011) under the headline “A’Level students rush to grab jobs in BPO sector” is about a new encouraging development. It says that the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector is one of the many sectors that have been growing fast over the past few years, and that it creates job opportunities for professionals in an international setting. The great attraction that the BPO sector has for A Level students represents a new trend: many students prefer professional training and employment to a university education with doubtful employment prospects. The Lanka BPO Academy is an institution set up to train personnel for this sector. The popular Island columnist Yasas Abeywickrama (THE CATALYST/Monday) is associated with this academy. The contribution of young professionals like him is invaluable for the promotion of the education for employment concept among the youth.

But let me start with a sweeping look back at the past. The generation born around the time of independence are now in their sixties. Due to the political and economic reforms introduced after independence in the interest of the common masses, they were able to grow up in somewhat better circumstances than their parents had had any chance to (in terms of education, health, employment, standard of living, etc for instance). The present day young are the children of this post-independence generation. The younger generation have had the opportunity to grow up in a generally more egalitarian, independent, and materially less insecure atmosphere than their elders, even though amidst occasional political instability, corruption, and other setbacks exacerbated by internal and external vested interests, all of which appear to be inevitable concomitants of ‘democracy’.
Times have changed, changed utterly. For the masses, that is. The changes have been mostly for the better, and are most conspicuous in the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. These are naturally more evident to the older generation than to the younger, who might tend to take the status quo for granted: we have, hopefully, put behind us almost a lifetime of mainly destructive ‘struggles’ and are embarking on an age of goodwill and cooperation between sections of the body politic determined to move towards a common destiny as a young nation. Liberalised economic policies, despite certain limitations, have largely benefited the people. Social stratification is less severe; class, caste, rank divisions have begun to count for little. Culturally, our people are adopting more accommodative and adaptive attitudes than before.
Though positive changes have taken place in the educational domain as elsewhere since independence, such as free education for all the children of the country, the change of the medium of education from English to the mother tongue which benefited children from the Sinhala and Tamil speaking homes, the narrowly utilitarian literary character of general education inherited from colonial times hasn’t changed to the extent it should. In other words, changes in education have not kept pace with changes in other fields; education has remained largely irrelevant to the actual needs of the country.
The idea that education should involve preparing the students for a life of work as much as training them for a life of the mind is not new. In fact, all the various educational reforms introduced so far have drawn attention to the real problem of a lack of balance in our education system between book-learning and practical skills acquisition. Yet the bookish bias in education still remains. One reason for this is that work that demands manual exertion is considered inferior to work that requires mental effort. Practical skills mastery is looked down upon as suitable only for the ‘mentally less endowed’ in terms of traditional intelligence (IQ) testing which usually focuses on a general linguistic and mathematical ability. In the society at large the same attitude prevails. Other economically productive jobs such as agriculture, carpentry, various types of crafts, etc are reserved for the academically less promising. (However, this manual-mental distinction is more evidently unsupportable today.) Though there is a great demand for skilled professionals in these fields, there are a large number of educated youth who won’t fancy a career in any of them, and therefore are not interested in acquiring those skills. This is unfortunate. The bias against ‘manual labour’ is wrong, for whatever work people do also invariably involves knowledge and mental effort appropriate to it; this fact is more conspicuous in today’s knowledge world than before.
The downgrading of jobs in the most vital fields such as agriculture, building construction, manufacture of utility goods, food technology, handicrafts, woodwork, (to name just a few out of hundreds of possible examples) is a problem that must be addressed in the interest of the country’s economic wellbeing among other things. The main point is that it is partly a matter of misconceiving what is meant by ‘dignity of work’. Many of our people cannot get rid of traditional class-bound ways of thinking according to which certain jobs are considered to be of a higher rank than others. In education, this faulty attitude is reflected as a bias in favour of ‘academic’ subjects such as science, mathematics, and languages as opposed to technical subjects such as carpentry, plumbing, and dressmaking.
To promote vocational education among the secondary students in schools such harmful misconceptions need to be eliminated. The way to do this is to convince them of the fact that all forms of work are of equal dignity. What matters is not the public recognition that a person gets for belonging to a particular profession but the meaning it has for the worker and the society at large. Let’s teach our young to see work as an opportunity in the same way as the great American inventor, scientist, and businessman Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) did (and he warned others lest they miss it): “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work”. Edison is also remembered for having said “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”.
When education is not employment oriented, many educated young people are left without jobs even where jobs are found aplenty, but where persons with the necessary skills to take them up are few. This kind of structural unemployment accounts for a substantial part of the problem of joblessness in Sri Lanka. In this context, the importance of vocational education at the secondary school level need hardly be stressed. Secondary school graduates should be given a basic mastery of technical skills including computer knowledge that enables them to find gainful employment, if they so choose, instead of going to university, but still qualify themselves further academically while working. It is encouraging to see that a trend is now emerging where many young school leavers seem to think it wiser to enrol for vocational courses or find direct employment if possible and pursue higher studies autonomously. This is no drawback for students particularly in some fields such as business, banking, agriculture, motor mechanism, etc. Actually, a work environment is very helpful for focusing the mind. Work and study: each becomes a way to relax for employed students when the other tires them out.
The availability of such an option can be very attractive to many students and parents. It will naturally ease the pressure on the existing university system. It is true that university graduates, if successful in finding a job commensurate with their qualifications, do better than non-university graduates. But, in the case of many Sri Lankan graduate employees their education is often irrelevant to the work they are actually required to do.
Close cooperation between the education and industrial sectors is a vital economic factor for any country, for the most important asset it has is its youth. A country’s education sector is responsible for equipping the young people with the knowledge and skills that industrialists and business people demand.