Education and independence
published:
Sunday | August 10, 2008
Robert Buddan POLITICS OF OUR TIME
Governments of post-independence Jamaica invested significantly in education. In their study of political administrations in Jamaica, Munroe and Bertram show that primary school enrolment more than doubled from 210,000 in 1955 to almost 432,000 in 1976. Secondary school enrolment was even more dramatic. It jumped from a meagre 8,500 to over 130,000 over those years. Tertiary enrolment was a mere 543 moving to 12,600 in those 21 years. It is now over 40,000. The number of government-aided schools grew from 212 to 945. These figures suggest that a revolution in education had taken place. How is it then that Jamaica ranks around 100 among all countries on the education index of the Human Development Report of the United Nations? This index combines enrolment at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels, and literacy levels.
Education and development do not relate to each other in a simple linear fashion. It is not necessarily the case that the higher the rate of enrolment the greater the level of a country's development. If the investment in education does not pay back to the benefit of the budget, then governments will find it difficult to continuously maintain the cost of expanding good quality education.
capital investment
In 2004, the capital investment in Jamaica's education plant was worth $200 billion at replacement value. But that investment was not being paid back. So, Jamaica's second revolution in education commenced with the Education Task Force for the Transformation of Education in 2003/4. The report's concern was mainly with achieving performance targets. For this, it called for even greater investment in education, of 73 per cent or $22 billion a year, over each of the 10 years from 2004 to 2014.
Almost halfway through this period, we are well short of this level of financing. Government and school principals now quarrel over the inadequacy of public funding and the difficulty in making this up with auxiliary fees. The second revolution is stillborn.
A country needs to accumulate a certain threshold of human resource skills to graduate from one level of development to a higher one. But three phenomena upset any possible linear relationship between education and development. One is Jamaican Creole. When the linguistic backgrounds of groups diverge sharply from English, underachievement results. This is a global and historical phenomenon. School inspectors in Jamaica noticed the problem from as far back as the late 1800s. They noted a causal relationship between English teaching and achievement across the curriculum. Students simply did not understand the language of instruction. The problem is reinforced by the inequality in the educational system. Jamaican children are as bright and creative as any other. They do not fail as much as they underachieve and they underachieve because there is a barrier between their natural language and the required standard.
The second problem is that the message that education is the key to upward mobility does not have the same resonance anymore. Alternative paths to wealth and new heroes to emulate in sports, music, criminal enterprise, Lotto, and a number of other ways of making a living and getting rich quick rely more on being creative, clever and bold, than on having education or knowing proper English.
LOSS OF HUMAN CAPITAL
The third problem is that the educated class is migrating. The International Monetary Fund reports (2006) that "majority of Caribbean countries have lost more than 50 per cent of the labour force in the tertiary education segment and more than 30 per cent in the secondary education segment (nine to 12 years of schooling). For example, the tertiary-educated labour force (with more than 12 years of schooling) in Jamaica and Guyana has been reduced by 85 per cent and 89 per cent respectively, due to migration to Organisation for Cooperation and Economic Development member countries. Haiti has the lowest aggregate emigration rate (about 10 per cent) in the region, but the tertiary-educated labour force has been reduced by 84 per cent due to migration to the OCED member countries. In fact, almost all the Caribbean countries are among the top 20 in the world with the highest tertiary-educated migration rate (my emphasis). The magnitude of these migration rates suggests that potentially migration can have large impacts on the local labour markets and on the welfare of those who stay behind in the Caribbean."
The irony is that in the first decade of independence, countries were losing the very human resources they needed to make independence viable. Elizabeth Thomas-Hope says that the number of technical and professional workers from Jamaica entering the United States with permanent visas rose from 176 in 1965 to 1,777 in 1968.
MIDDLE CLASS DISPLACEMENT
The migrant is often more educated when compared to his counterpart who remains at home. The better educated he is, the greater is his chance of finding a job overseas and the more likely that he will be targeted by recruitment agencies trying to attract the most skilled migrants. The idea that people migrate because they are poor is not entirely correct.
Migration is creaming off the most educated and productive age groups, those between 20 and 44, who have the skills that countries need if they are to graduate from one level of development to another. The Caribbean is losing its middle class, the class that provides the critical human resources for the public, private and social sectors. This exacerbates the inequality between rich and poor. When there is no middle class to service either and to mute the sharp differences between the upper and lower classes the gap of inequality widens and so does the social danger to society. The region is not just an exporter of labour, but is exporting the classes that are critical for nation building.
The social danger is not necessarily a class war, but a violent society. We are re-importing a new criminal class in the void. Anne-marie Barnes' study on deportees in Latin America and the Caribbean (2007) shows that Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana alone absorbed 30,000 deportees between 1990 and 2005, of which 17,000 were convicted for drug trafficking, 600 for murder, and 1,800 for illegal gun possession. Of these, 75 per cent were deported from the United States. This number is equivalent to one million drug offenders and 40,000 murderers being sent to the United States, a situation the US would not entertain. Between 2001 and 2004 Jamaica absorbed an average of 2,700 convicts a year along with a number of convicted murderers. Six hundred murders in Jamaica are equivalent to 60,000 murders in the US.
Of every 106 Caribbean male over 15, one is a deportee from the United States. This means that, 8,000 deportees from the US over 15 years of age were involved in criminal activities between 1998 and 2005. Deportees are less likely to be caught because they have more resources, experience and escape networks. This results in low arrest rates in the Caribbean. Crime costs the region 3.5 per cent of its GDP. The Caribbean has the highest per capita murder rate in the world. It costs Jamaica 7.5 per cent of its GDP. Jamaica has one of the highest per-capita murder rates in the world.
Migration leads to class displacement when the skilled and educated classes leave and class replacement when the criminal classes replace them. We cannot build a nation this way.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.
