by Mahendran Thiruvarangan
Reforming Sri Lanka’s education system in ways that cater to global needs appears to be a central focus of the new government. This pronouncement first appeared in the NPP’s election manifesto with reference to vocational education. Later, in October 2024, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake stated that our education system should be rebuilt in alignment with global demands. Prime Minister and Minister of Education Harini Amarasuriya mentioned in a speech in December 2024 that building a skilled workforce capable of meeting the needs of both local and global labour markets is a key objective of the government’s development vision.
While it may be important that we reflect upon how our education system facilitates (or does not facilitate) our school-leavers and graduates to secure jobs and contribute meaningfully to the national and global economies, it is equally necessary to unpack the lauded terms ‘global’ and ‘global job market’ and discuss the hegemonies and exclusions they produce as regards both education and employment.
Two Visions of the Global
‘Global’ as a frame or vision is invoked in two contrasting ways in contemporary political discourses. One points to the creation of a borderless world which facilitates the transmission of capital across national borders. Such a world, despite its promise of prosperity and progress, is haunted by the many tragedies that the global south has seen as a result of the precarity created by the free flow of transnational capital. The Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984 and the fires that burnt down garment factories in Bangladesh in 2012 are just two examples. These disasters are attributable to the workings of the global labour market and the logic and mechanisms that it deploys to create divisions within the global labour force along racial, gendered and national lines. Within this system that creates boundless profits for the wealthy, the global south and its working classes, especially women and subalterns, are pushed into experiencing extreme forms of vulnerability.
In juxtaposition to this cataclysmic view of the global, those with a commitment to social justice and internationalism frame the global as an ideal that strives for a world built around solidarities and a radical imagination of liberation and equality. This world is united by a shared desire to eliminate all forms of oppression, both locally and globally.
Our conversations on education seem to be animated by these two varying visions of the global. On the one hand, there is an increased push by governments, international financial organizations, donor agencies and a section of the academia for our universities to produce a globalized labour force for the private sector that will subserviently meet the demands of transnational capital. On the other side, the glaring inequalities that we see in our communities and countries call for a revitalization of the education system which includes cultivating a critical consciousness and creative abilities that kindle imaginaries of togetherness and resistance among students, workers and citizens. As socio-economic inequalities fuelled by neoliberalism are widening in both Sri Lanka and most countries in the global south, there is an urgent need to bring to the front and centre this second vision of the global in our deliberations on educational reforms.
Global Job Market vs Global Crises
The global labour market is a neoliberal idea which forces education systems all across the world to produce and supply a docile labour force that can help global capitalism advance its exploitative, neocolonial agendas. The imperatives of this market are designed to ensure that the world remains a place of deep inequalities and only a limited number of people have access to jobs that can guarantee basic comforts and facilities such as housing, healthcare, transportation and electricity. Thus, one has to be skeptical of educational policies informed by the thinking and rationales that govern the global labour market.
There exists a huge disconnect between the expectations of the global labour market and the stark realities that characterize the current global moment which demand the attention of those involved in educational endeavours. The genocide in Gaza, the rise of right-wing populism in many parts of the world, the growing income inequalities within many countries, the alarming rates at which our environment is being denuded and the hostility women and sexual minorities face all across the world are some deeply worrying incidents and trends that we are watching today.
The reforms thrust upon our education systems by donor agencies, such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank tend to align with a neoliberal vision. They do not situate education and employment in relation to these economic and political crises that affect millions of people across the world today; nor do they have any interest in creating an understanding among students about the histories of these crises and how the failures of our education systems have contributed to the current global disarray.
Neoliberal Educational Reforms
Neoliberal donors are focused primarily on making our educational institutions meet the conditionalities of the global labour market. They push governments to privatize education and universities to introduce fee-levying academic programmes. Their goal is to turn education into a marketable commodity and education systems into profit-making sites. Rather than striving for an education that creates local and global solidarities for change, these donors lay emphasis on creating technologies that can link countries and continents in ways that can support the onward march of extractive capital. A good example in this regard is Sri Lanka’s educational reforms since the 2000s which have given a central place to the teaching of English and Information Technology. These two areas were marketed as qualifications necessary for graduates to survive in a job market dominated by transnational capitalist conglomerates.
Similarly, the current moves to remove critical content from the curricula and replace them with ‘soft skills’ such as leadership, ethics and morality, communication and public speaking as pre-requisites for employment is geared towards producing a corporate-attired, global, English-speaking class of entrepreneurs and those who assist them unquestioningly in their neoliberal pursuits. Such courses, while universalizing colonial values and ways of thinking, isolate skills from criticality, technology from politics, and employment from action and activism.
Creating disciplinary hierarchies, neoliberal reforms privilege hard sciences, technology education, management and accounting and the English language. As a result, in many countries the Humanities and Social Sciences are defunded and denigrated as disciplines without any use value. There have been attempts to remove courses with a focus on literatures and languages from the general curriculum at universities. In some settings, academics who teach these disciplines are faced with the threat of losing their jobs.
In Sri Lanka, degree programmes in English Language Teaching are presented as lucrative, whereas literature programmes and local languages are branded as disciplines that will not yield any monetary benefits to the learner. If Arts, Literatures and Humanities have any value within this system, their role is reduced to providing entertainment for those with material comforts. The classical Roman poet Horace said that poetry should both instruct and delight simultaneously.
The neoliberal labour market drives a wedge into this twinned goal, framing arts and literature in narrow terms as pleasure generating industries. It seeks to erase the role creative, affective labour plays in bringing about social change. This is why governments should be able to see through and, when necessary, see past the global labour market in rejuvenating our education system.
The Way-forward for the NPP Government
The NPP government, which won the elections with the promise of change, should not allow the neoliberal conditionalities of the global labour market to overdetermine its educational reforms. The economic crisis that led to the people’s uprising of 2022 and the NPP’s electoral victories was caused mainly by the country’s descent into neoliberalism. If the government is serious about taking the country out of the current crisis, it must fight neoliberalism head-on at all fronts, including within the education sector. Being indecisive and sending out confusing signals, such as commitment to social justice on the one hand and statements in support of the edicts and expectations of the global job market on the other, will weaken the education system further. This ambiguity results in part from the severe pressure exerted by donor agencies on whom the education sector of Sri Lanka and many other countries rely on for funding.
Identifying its budget priorities rightly, the new government should increase spending on state education and create and support educational pursuits that help students resist the hegemonies of global capital. There should be increased support for the Humanities and Social Sciences and increased encouragement for universities to re-frame degree programmes in natural sciences in ways that that help students explore technologies and remedies that minimize socio-economic inequalities and support ecologically viable development initiatives. Overall, the reform process should be approached with a new, liberationist outlook focused on egalitarian social transformation.
