by Hasini Lecamwasam
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, at a progress review meeting with the Ministry of Education (among others) earlier in October, emphasised the need to reform the country’s education system to better respond to global needs. This is a reiteration of a longstanding policy commitment, reflecting an equally longstanding oblivion to how this has failed, time and again, to work for us. The ‘global need’ is to integrate every society of the world to the global capitalist market, on the highly unequal terms that were crystallised over the course of Europe’s colonial adventures. In this constellation, developing societies like Sri Lanka are but frontiers of global capitalism, expected to contribute raw material, cheap labour, and sinks for dumping industrial and agricultural waste (including low quality consumer goods that don’t meet the standards expected by high protectionist markets like that of the EU). In the present essay, my aim is to lay down the recent history of higher education ‘reform’ in Sri Lanka, in an attempt to illustrate how this ‘transforming for the global capitalist market’ has gradually unfolded, and briefly discuss why that strategy may not work.
Recent higher education reforms in Sri Lanka
The shift from state- to donor-funded higher education (including the World Bank and Asian Development Bank) started in Sri Lanka in the late 1990s, specifically with the 1997 educational reforms. These reforms need to be understood in the context of the late 1990s, when the country was attempting a negotiated settlement to the ethnic conflict, as a result of which a ceasefire was in operation. Consequently, development-oriented aid started flowing from institutions such as the World Bank, of course with conditionalities attached. The reconstruction efforts during this time also largely relied on such aid, making compliance an essential requirement. In the larger global context, the structural adjustments pushed through in many developing countries starting in the 1970s were making considerable headway, incorporating economies big and small, central and peripheral to the global capitalist system. By the 1990s, therefore, conditions were ripe for further transformation of economies in the capitalist mould, a process in which Sri Lanka was but one small part.
The main thrust of the reforms was to enhance the country’s human capital and thereby create “well-rounded citizens who were employable”. It is within this framing that we see STEM subjects – considered to contribute to higher levels of ‘employability’ among their graduates by virtue of the higher percentages that find employment – being explicitly encouraged. With their emphasis on transferable skills and demonstrable competency levels, STEM subjects provide tools that are well suited for the abstraction of labour required by capitalism, particularly at the global level where comparability across a wide array of labour markets matters more than ever before. In this shift to demonstrable, competency-based education, coupled with a policy commitment to responding to global market signals with renewed vigour (including through the restructuring of education), labour is the commodity that would ensure economic security and prosperity of the nation, and it is through the enhancement of labour (human capital) that national ambitions may be achieved.
These commitments were renewed through the 2009 education policy framework, that also, for the first time, explicitly recognised the need for private HEIs. This year also coincides with the World Bank’s first project in state universities – Improving Relevance and Quality of Undergraduate Education, or IRQUE – that was its first step towards tailoring labour as per the requirements of the capitalist market.
In 2012, these measures were institutionalised through the introduction of the Sri Lanka Qualification Framework (SLQF), with a view to streamlining all higher educational qualifications offered in Sri Lanka. In larger terms, the SLQF’s objective is to render the education landscape intelligible to the employment market, such that, a given set of skills a particular level of education is supposed to produce neatly maps onto the skills required by given job positions available in the market. Again, it is clear that the national labour force was being ‘groomed’ to respond to market signals which are themselves dictated by hegemonic powers of the global capitalist order.
Three subsequent policy documents – the 2020 National Audit Office report on higher education, the National Education Policy Framework (NEPF) of 2020-2030, and the latter’s more recent invocation titled NEPF 2023-2033 – all sought to further entrench these changes in the higher education sector of Sri Lanka.
The problem
Exporting labour – of different gradations of ‘skill’ – may no longer be a viable way out to manage internal under- and unemployment; nor will offshore operations (such as in IT, among others) be tenable for long, if these trends in the global centre are to hold. The mentioned policy prescriptions, and the global financial interests that drive them, don’t take into account the historical and structural build-up of our economies, and what implications they have for the decisions we make. Consider the following example from Bernstein (2003: 11) for how the strategy of purely relying on global market signals went wrong in recent history:
The USA … deployed its surpluses of subsidised grain (and soy oil) for strategic foreign policy purposes through foreign aid and export promotion (dumping), which stimulated dependence on (cheap) American wheat in areas of the imperialist periphery hitherto largely self-sufficient in staple food production. In turn this facilitated the further specialisation of the latter in the production of industrial and (mostly non-staple) food crops for world markets, as did the ambitious development plans of the newly independent former colonies of Asia and Africa, for most of which the earnings of primary commodity exports (agricultural and mineral) were the principal source of foreign exchange for import-substituting industrialisation. This created the conditions of a potential scissors effect for many poor, primarily agricultural, countries, one blade being increasing food import dependence, the other the fluctuating but generally declining terms of trade for their historic export crops.
Given the structure of the global economy, there is no reason why these patterns would not endure. We may want to consider the fact that at present, cities in the global North are becoming increasingly more concerned about climate change, and are contemplating several measures to reduce the carbon foot print. Chief among these measures is reining in consumption, with degrowth models being seriously considered. This will obviously have grave implications for our economies that rely so much on simply responding to the demands of consumerism emanating from the global metropole. We could particularly expect high consumerist sectors such as tourism to be considerably affected. Since the recent proliferation of tourism related components in many Arts and Management faculties seeks to capitalise on Sri Lanka’s tourism potential, these shifts need to be urgently deliberated on.
Crises in the developed world related to increasing numbers of migrants, such as a worsening employment and opportunity squeeze, further compound the issue. While sparking a series of socio-political reactions including and especially the further entrenchment of racism in everyday life, and the associated wins of the far Right across several countries in Europe, these developments also have ramifications for our employment landscape and, therefore, our system of education.
In lieu of a conclusion
The point simply is that we cannot continue to blindly respond to the signals of the global market, because it is hard wired to serve the interests of the global metropole even at the cost of others. We need an urgent appraisal of the structural position of our country in the global economic order, a consequent critical re-examination of our economic and political priorities, and an equally urgent deliberation of what we can do to develop sectors within the country, not for exporting, but for retaining. Obviously, this doesn’t and shouldn’t preclude international economic relations; but a change of vision and direction is much in order. If we simply continue to be a conduit for global big capital, and design our educational programmes to fulfill that requirement, we might yet again find ourselves catching pneumonia just because the rich countries caught a cold.
