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Mauritius: Education's messy saga
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L'Express (Port Louis)
22 August 2007
Posted to the web 22 August 2007
By Surendra Bissoondoyal
Port Louis
Our world class minister has made a fantastic discovery: it is a waste of resources to put only 30 students into a hall that can accommodate more than 500 people. Hence the decision to teach them in such large groups. If world class quality cannot be achieved, at least Mauritian class quantity is an achievable goal.
This discovery is however a little belated, particularly coming from somebody who has been teaching for donkey's years at the University. It is like Molière's character who had been doing prose all his life without realizing it. If the university authorities had been told about this discovery earlier they would have built a large number of such halls instead of smaller classrooms, and there would have been no accommodation problem today. Simple, as Christopher Columbus replied when he made an egg stand upright to illustrate how he can reach India by going in a direction opposite to the known route.
In a couple of months' time we will be identifying our "elite" through a rote learning and memorization process for children aged 5 to 11. No sports. No music. No art. No learning to live together. Only cut-throat competition. And then suddenly another new discovery. When they are at the university they will have to work in groups to produce their dissertation. Forget about the culture of competition and adopt a new culture of co-operation. Not so obvious. Just as slogans like knowledge hub, seafood hub, medical hub . But we do not put our money where our mouth is. First promise free transport. Then find out how much it will cost, and finally where the money is going to come from.
Do we have a vision of education beyond the CPE and a vision of Mauritius beyond the next elections? A country which aspires to become a knowledge hub in the region needs to have a well worked out plan on how to build it up. The tertiary education sector is in the same shape that the secondary sector was in the 1960s and 70s. Secondary "schools" were sprouting like mushrooms without appropriate infrastructure and other resources, including human resources.
Today we seem to think that once we have identified our "elite" at the age of 11 and put them through "star" secondary schools our education strategy is in place with a "laureate scheme" for export only. We need a drastic re-think of the role and objectives of tertiary education, including vocational education. The State has the duty to invest massively in this sector, but so should the private sector with some contribution from the students.
Singapore can boast of a "world class quality" tertiary education sector. It has top universities in which the state and the private sector have invested and continue to invest massively. But the students also have to contribute to some extent towards the cost of their own development. A whole range of incentives and motivations are put at the disposal of the students to ensure that no one is denied access owing to lack of funds. Scholarships, bursaries and low-interest loans repayable when they start working are some of the motivating measures put in place to encourage them to join the tertiary sector for their own development and on whom the state will rely for its development.
Tertiary education does not also mean full-time studies only. The concept of an open university is to encourage lifelong education and re-skilling and to provide a second opportunity to those who have, for one reason or another, missed out on the possibility of joining the sector when they left school. The bill setting up the Open University of Mauritius (O.U.M) was passed in the National Assembly more than two years ago, but it is still waiting to be set up.
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Ministers, as we know, are responsible for policy making in general. But can we really have a performing tertiary sector if it has no autonomy, if it has to seek the approval of the minister for the appointment of each and every employee and for every minor development, and if funds are released "au compte-gouttes"?
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