David Jessop

A few days ago, I was talking to one of the Eastern Caribbean's more successful and innovative businessmen. We were discussing the issues surrounding the OECS states' position in the negotiations for an economic partnership agreement with Europe and the sub-region's economic prospects.

Our conversation turned to education and government. He observed that one of the greatest challenges facing the business community in the Eastern Caribbean is to have Government, and in particular its officials, understand, that education is not an end in itself, but one that relates to a nation's economic requirements far into the future.

It was still not understood, he said, that learning was to a significant extent about producing suitably qualified individuals to work in the range of industries that represent the Caribbean of tomorrow.

Strategic failure

While this may seem obvious and there is of course a case for learning as a mind-opening, life-enhancing experience, what my acquaintance was pointing to was a strategic failure in much of the Caribbean.

Alarmingly, what has yet to be understood in much of the public sector is that education was not about producing individuals fit for the lower tiers of the civil service or for agriculture, but about finding ways to ensure at both a national and regional level that a nation has the skills required by the private sector to remain competitive.

Coincidentally, our conversation coincided with reports of the release in Europe of a study that rates education systems that is produced by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the body that brings together the world's most powerful economies.

This annual report is based on the premise that as economic globalisation proceeds, work is outsourced across the planet. To compete, countries need to produce young people in ever increasing numbers, with higher secondary education possessing skills suited to a technology-and services-driven age. The annual study indicates those that are most prepared for the future.

As a consequence, this document has become in the developed world one of the measures by which it is possible to judge which wealthy nations are likely to experience sustained growth or progress.

The OECD league tables have therefore become an important measure in enabling governments to assess their competitors' position on everything from the proportion of students studying mathematics, to school dropout rates and the numbers going on to universities.

For instance, while these statistics do not correlate exactly with economic growth, the OECD report suggests that nations such as South Korea, and others in Asia, are achieving a remarkable growth in a way that is partly attributable to the rapid expansion over the last 20 years in the numbers completing secondary education.

In contrast, Europe and the United States are beginning to see their advantage eroded as school dropout rates increase and their education-dependent economies loose earning power.

Devolved educational structures

More contentiously, a second major trend in education suggested by the OECD league tables, is that some of the most positive results occur in countries that have devolved much of the responsib-ility for delivering education to a local level or to schools themselves. Centralised and bureaucratic education ministries in OECD nations are, it seems, giving way to a light, centrally-controlled regulatory framework within which devolved educational structures and learning support local needs. The reports also seems to suggest that those countries that have encouraged non-govern-mental relationships in education and new forms of diversity, have achieved better results, through the provision of greater choice and competition.

All of this is challenging as it touches on sensitive social and political beliefs, which is to say nothing about the extent to which cultural, economic and genera-tional factors play an important role in the desire to learn.

In the Caribbean, these issues are debated at the highest levels of Government but at the level of the individual, there still seems to be a sense among many that education represents a ticket out of the region or into a local-élite.

Services-dominated future

Despite this, there are some important lessons in the OECD approach as the region tries to create a single market and economy and move from employment dependency on preference-led agriculture to newer industries and sectors.

Of these, perhaps the most important is that education relates to economic growth, employment and the role of private sector.

To put this in perspective, tourism is the primary employer of labour in the region. Its prosperity and success touches almost every other sector. Yet, much of the public sector seems to believe it is still turning out young people for a world that began to disappear in the 1970s. Whether it is in relation to secondary, tertiary or higher levels of education, the Caribbean seems not to have caught up with the reality of where the region's economy is likely to be in the next decade.

While there is a continuing role for agriculture in the context of niche markets, food security and its integration with tourism and energy needs, the reality is that Brazil and many other nations across the globe will outperform anything that the Caribbean can hope for in primary agriculture. Much the same holds true of manufacturing, other than where value can be added in order to overcome the region's relatively high labour costs, small market size and weak transport infrastructure.

What this points to is a services- dominated future that requires the delivery of skills and forms of education radically different to those of the past and a complete mind change about the nature of government and the public sector's new role as enabler. It also requires a much more strident approach to the private sector's educational needs by bodies such as the proposed new Caribbean Business Council.

In the 1960s and '70s it was the public sector and governments across the region that attracted the best minds.

David Jessop is director of the Caribbean Council. Email:david.jessop@caribbean-council.org.