"I have seen slaves on horseback while princes go on foot like slaves"
Ecclesiastes 10: 7

The Gleaner has underscored in recent editorials, and using 2007 as a point of reference, the preponderance of Jamaican University of the West Indies (UWI) graduates in the humanities and education (32 per cent ), social sciences (42 per cent), medicine (14 per cent), as well as in pure, applied and natural sciences (10 per cent). This has been compared with the almost rarity of engineering graduates (one per cent).

The editorials bemoan the fact that the product of our education system is not sufficiently channelled into areas best suited to widen, deepen and accelerate our socio-economic development. The suggestion is that the provision of government subsidies should be strategically used to better guide academic and professional interests into the more urgently required areas.

Prime requisite

No doubt, given the need for brevity in the columns, the editorial writer largely assumed the public's realisation that engineering is a prime requisite for development and that no country has ever attained development status without getting there on the back of the widely encompassing profession of engineering.

Traditionally, the rapidity in improvements in the effectiveness and efficiencies of the physical infrastructure (roads, bridges etc), and many of the key productive technologies, such as the information, agriculture, manufacturing and health, have been central tracks in the socio-economic development of most developed or swiftly developing countries.

If this pathway to socio-economic development is so clear, then there are legitimate questions. For example, are we really utilising education in the best possible way to attain national development? If the role of engineering in national development is so universal and unquestioned, why has it not been already interwoven into a Jamaican strategic plan? Why are we where we are now - a country which has so scandalously underperformed economically and so poorly utilised the considerable potential of its people?

Lack of proper planning

Of course, the absence of proper planning has been a major impediment to our development as a nation. Personal and political influence has, regrettably, been made to be critical in our organised activities. As such, our socio-economic efforts have largely been a mixture of the preferences of various persons with influence, rather than an objectively determined plan based on the total range of our assets, global political and economic factors, etc.

An example of this is the use of the Planning Institute of Jamaica which, until a year ago, was used for more than 20 years as a department of the ministry of finance to monitor our external loans and present reports on economic trends.

Gratefully, today it finally seems that an attempt is being made to do what its name demands - preparing a development plan. It is this development plan which should influence the determination of the product of the education system. Instead, the present programme, which was established in the colonial era for largely colonising purposes, does not serve the existing needs of an independent island nation operating under an open economic system and with a population of talented and ambitious people.

The stark fact is that in CARICOM, Jamaica with its 2.7 million people really serves as the market for the region.

Embarrassingly, given the present limitations of its productive sectors, its income has to be largely supplemented by the earnings of its diaspora in remittances and the export/transshipment of illegal substances.

Any development plan being contemplated has to take account of the two base tenets of economic development, which are labour and capital. These include a range of supplementary tenets, such as innovation and management, etc. The pursuit of economic development incorporates a multiplicity of factors which combination and emphasis, depends on a country's assets (human, physical, financial resources), the market to be served and the determined pathway or accepted plan to attain this. The end result must be the growing prosperity - health, well-being, financial security, etc, for an increa-sing majority of the population along with impartial justice for all.

Of course, the observance of accepted morality is universally endorsed as a crucial developmental guide, though historically there seems to be no doubt that that this has been largely lip service.

Astonishingly profitable

Between the 15th and 19th centuries, the path of development for most western European countries involved the utilisation of cheap (slave) labour working on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas on an astonishingly profitable basis for most of that period.

Significantly, the proceeds were used in the development of these European countries, much being used to finance the industrial revolution which further accelerated their socio-economic development, prosperity and political power. Their created colonies were, as far as possible, moulded in the image of the colonising power with largely comparable organisational structures framed within similarly oriented cultural and psychological environment.

As with the 'mother country', at the core of the colonies was an elitist system with major access to higher education, economic opportunities and local political power. Because of the centuries of the importation of cheap (slave) labour from different continents, the subsequent access to these elitist benefits was enhanced by skin shades, gender and religion. Of course, highly prized professions were largely supplied from the mother country. Its offered 'external' exams were derived from its education system and was the means of attracting the brightest and best in the colonies to staff the more numerous jobs in the civil service. This, of itself, as well as its role and more direct interfacing with the colonising power and derived benefits then, e.g., 'home' leave to the United Kingdom (UK), elevated local civil servants to higher social status.

In the UK, measures had to be taken periodically (e.g., at the end of the Churchill era and during the Thatcher administration) to reduce areas of elitism which served to retard national socio-economic advancement. The elitist resistance to competition tends over time to attract and shelter mediocrity, developing a type of fiefdom which serves to repulse both possible competitors and new and perhaps better ideas.

The fact that in the UK the need for adjustments was recognised and taken speaks to the ability, at least at times, to be objective and take decisions in the interest of the nation. On the other hand, it is at this point that the knees of the elite in the former colonies become stubbornly locked and resistance hardens.

Decades of continued privilege during colonialism and subsequently 'independence,' with major influence in the social, economic and political spheres, become entrenched and are not easily given up. As such, the systems laid out in colonialism to suit the economic and political designs of the colonising power are largely still discernible, either because it suits the designs of the elites or its incestuous mediocrity makes it inept to either recognise inadequacies or correct these.

From the public viewpoint: