?Those systems of education which start from an insufficient knowledge of man, think they have provided a satisfactory foundation when they have supplied the student with a large or well-selected mass of information on the various subjects which comprise the best part of human culture at the time. The school gives the materials, it is for the students to use them,? this is the formula. But the error is fundamental. Information cannot be the foundation of intelligence, it can only be part of the material out of which the knower builds knowledge, the starting point, the nucleus of fresh discovery and enlarged creation. An education that confines itself to imparting knowledge, is no education.?

<B>Sri AUROBINDO</B>

LAST YEAR?S crisis at the University of Mauritius (U.O.M.) came as no surprise to anyone familiar with the world of education and training. What was probably surprising was the ease with which that particular problem got solved and forgotten. The recent announcement by the vice-chancellor that the U.O.M. will increase its intake by 50% seems to suggest that all is now well with the university and that it can envisage a substantial expansion without any apprehension.

In fact last year?s problem which was being presented as mainly one of resources - financial, infrastructural and human - was only the tip of the iceberg with the much more serious problems remaining hidden and not dealt with. These problems have to do with the quality and nature of education and training being provided by the U.O.M. and, more fundamentally, with the role of the university in the development of the country in the present context and with its capacity to assume that role.

Ministers of Education, for the past twenty years, have focused their attention on the primary and secondary sectors and have assumed that if these sectors function well then the tertiary sector will automatically follow. Unfortunately they have not only failed to solve the problems at the primary and secondary levels but the tertiary sector too has become contaminated with the same ills.

There is the same emphasis on the passing of exams; students learn to be good at answering examination papers but are not encouraged by the system to develop the personal skills that are so essential for coping with the world of work and with the problems of life in a complex society.

A high level report prepared a few years ago noted the concern of investors in the ICT sector regarding the lack of generic skills of those who enter the labour market. The most common weaknesses reported were: poor spoken English and French, lack of ability to analyse issues and solve problems, lack of clarity of thought and of cogent writing ability, lack of commitment, lack of patience, inability to handle stress, lack of team spirit, lack of empathy, lack of attention to details. This list of weaknesses should come as no surprise to Mauritians; they have become national characteristics!

What is alarming is that they show up among those who are supposed to constitute our elite. As can be noted the weaknesses concern more the personal competencies of the graduates than their technical knowledge. Unfortunately for us, in the present business environment, personal skills are as important as and, in some fields, even more important than technical skills. A few examples of actual experiences by companies looking for personnel will show the extent of the problem.

A well-known Indian firm carried out a selection exercise for graduates in a particular field. They interviewed 200 applicants and found only five suitable candidates! The interviewers realised that the applicants did not lack potential but had not been properly trained. So they did another exercise, selected 100 candidates and sent them to India for intensive training. Sixty passed. Not the best of scores, but which shows that the people selected were sufficiently good that after only a few months of proper training they were able to reach levels of personal competencies and technical skills that made them fit to meet the requirements of a world class company.

<I>?Our political parties should also be involved in these discussions for we need a national consensus so that a change of government or of ministers does not mean having to start all over again. We need to rise above the political skirmishes and the personal interests.?</I>

The second example concerns a British firm. It recruited a number of graduates but was not happy with their performance. The same weaknesses as mentioned above were diagnosed. The firm decided to re-educate the graduates to change their mindset. It took nine months to do so but, following that, it took the Mauritian graduates 18 months to reach the level of performance that their counterparts in Britain achieved after 24 months!

So it was worthwhile for the firm to employ Mauritians even though they needed extra training initially: they cost less and are more productive. Many foreign firms have reported the same experience. Mauritian firms too have reported the same difficulty in finding suitable graduates. The Human Resource Manager of a well-known firm described his experience of a recruitment exercise thus: ?After a pre-selection we interviewed a number of graduates. We had the utmost difficulty to select the best, not because they were all good but because they were all poor.?

These examples concern graduates, but the same weaknesses show up with SC and HSC holders. What is interesting is that after the initial retraining, Mauritian SC and HSC holders perform better than their overseas counterparts, so much so that some firms employ HSC holders here to do certain jobs that require graduates elsewhere.

Unfortunately few Mauritian firms take the trouble or have the resources to carry out training programmes for graduates. It is interesting to note that the programme set up by government to give one year training to unemployed graduates has proved quite successful; a large number of graduates on training in private firms get employed even before their training is over.

The good news from these experiences is that our students are World Class; unfortunately they are being destroyed by a World Crass Education System! We cannot lay all the blame on the present Minister of Education for this situation, although he deserves no praise for doing everything to consolidate the existing system. The present state of affairs has developed over a number of years and a number of governments and all stake holders, governments, ministers, educational institutions, educators, parents, the public at large, have all been guilty of short sightedness, of complacency, of taking the easy way out and of lack of courage to change what needed to be changed.

This has happened not just in education but in all areas of national activity be it economic, social, cultural, political, even sports. Today all the chicken have come to roost at the same time and we feel overwhelmed and do not know what to do; but we need to face the facts, diagnose the ills and take appropriate action if we want to survive as a nation.

As we can see, the problems at the University of Mauritius are not just financial, they are far more deep-rooted and to solve them will require going back to the basics. In a sense the university has to go back to the drawing board. We should redefine the role of the university in present-day Mauritius: what can, and should, the university do to be of maximum use to the country at this stage of its development? The first and most basic function of a university is to provide education and training. That, the university is doing. During the past few years the university has put emphasis on the need to cater for as many of our school leavers who want to pursue a university education as possible. The student intake has been increased considerably in the past few years. It is obvious the university cannot keep on expanding at that rate and maintain standards. Some people will argue that the need to cater for the growing number of students who want a university education is a national priority. So it is.

However, a simple calculation will show that the U.O.M. will not be able to meet the demands alone. Assuming that we target a modest 30 % of the yearly intake at primary level to carry on to do university studies we shall need to cater for 10000 students every year. Assuming that half of them will go overseas or study at other institutions, the U.O.M. will need to find 5000 places every year for its undergraduate courses alone. Taking into account the other courses that the university will have to run that will mean a student population of at least 20,000.

The Reduit campus cannot cope with a student population of that size, certainly not in the immediate future. I believe that, taking into account the recent expansion and the present situation, the university should not expand beyond a student population of 10,000 in the next five years. This means that other arrangements will have to be found to cater for the increasing number of students wishing to pursue university studies. Solutions exist, of course.

One of the essential elements of these solutions is the provision of loans to students. In many countries like the U.K., Canada, Japan, etc loan schemes are run by government and have proved very effective in assisting students who wish to pursue further studies. I proposed such a scheme a few years ago, but the government then felt that such loan schemes should be left to the commercial banks to run. In fact, the banks, the Employees Welfare Fund and other institutions have such schemes, but, as in many other things, it requires government involvement to create the interest. But that is another debate, although related. The point is that the university cannot and should not expand much further.

<I>?As we can see, the problems at the University of Mauritius are not just financial, they are far more deep-rooted and to solve them will require going back to the basics. In a sense the University has to go back to the drawing board.?</I>

Then, the university has to ask itself a number of questions. Are the courses it is offering relevant to the needs of the country? What is the profile of the graduates it needs to produce and hence the nature and quality of education that it has to provide? What should be the personal qualities and competencies of the lecturers and administrators? The university must address all these issues if it is to achieve the objective of quality education that it professes. The first thing that the university must do is to have a serious look at the courses it is running; Are they all useful and relevant to the needs of the country? For example the university runs a degree course in economics when there are hundreds economics graduates who are underemployed.

When I pointed this out to a high official of the university some years back, he said: ?What shall we do with all the economics lecturers?? They can certainly be very usefully employed in running courses in finance, banking, etc, that requires an economics input. Our financial services sector would have been happy to get people with qualifications in these fields.

Similarly a number of courses in management serve no useful purpose; they have to be redesigned or scrapped. The university should look at everything it is doing and ask itself whether it should continue to do that and then look at what it is not doing and examine what it could do to meet the development needs of the country.

The next thing that the university should do is to have a quality audit. As in everything else, the inexorable Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to the university as well; that is, unless a conscious effort is made to prevent it, order will slowly slide into disorder. It is well known that many lecturers turn up late or unprepared or do not turn up at all for lectures; they are unable to inculcate in their students the love of the subject that characterises all good professionals. Nothing is done to inculcate the right attitudes to work, to develop the power of analysis, and all the personal competencies that mean a lot to employers and that will be useful to the students themselves in their life as adults and citizens.

The personal development of the students is as important as the technical knowledge imparted to them. In our fast changing technological and social environment where people may have to change jobs four or five times in their working life they have to be versatile, flexible, intellectually alert and socially adaptable. It is the role of the university to inculcate these qualities in their students, all the more so since primary and secondary schooling has had a disastrous effect in this respect.

Other than academic excellence a university is judged by the quality of research that it carries out. Here too it must be admitted that there is nothing much to be exuberant about; although some excellent work has been carried out, this has been very sporadic and has been the efforts of dedicated individuals and has not resulted in a culture of research as in many universities overseas. And yet the field for research is vast. We have done almost nothing in the use of solar energy; Reunion Island and even the Seychelles have done more. So have they in the field of building climatology.

We have done nothing in the use of the biomass for energy production. Bio-agriculture is a field that offers vast possibilities for the local market and for export; we have done nothing there either. We are surrounded by a vast ocean that offers almost unlimited scope for research; we have done nothing. We have an interesting environment for social research; a few individuals have done some work but we should have had a vibrant department of social studies. With the large number of languages spoken in the country we could have become a leading centre for the study of languages, with a resulting successful language industry. These are only a few obvious examples.

There is so much to do and yet so little has been done. We talk of becoming a knowledge hub but we have done nothing but vain talk. The university has a key role to play in the creation of the knowledge hub; but for that it cannot be content with being a teaching institution, it must also become a centre of research. Research transforms a teaching institution into a centre of learning. It ignites the imagination and inspires in students the desire to do great things, to discover and create. The university should set itself a vision: ?To be one of the Best Centres of Learning and Research in the African and Indian Ocean Region.?

It is a tall order but we have the potential to realise it. But, for that, we shall need to set ourselves to work seriously. To get things moving, we shall need to set up a task force consisting of people with vision who can rise above narrow selfish and short term interests to define the objectives, propose a strategy and an action programme to turn the vision into reality. These proposals should then be discussed with all stake holders and a consensus reached.

Our political parties should also be involved in these discussions for we need a national consensus so that a change of government or of ministers does not mean having to start all over again. We need to rise above the political skirmishes and the personal interests that so often mask as communal interests that have dominated our national life for far too long and that are leading us straight to disaster.

All matters of fundamental importance to the life of the people must be the subject of discussion between all stake holders and a consensus reached on what has to be done. Once a national consensus has been reached on an issue we should get on with the job; any changes that need to be made should also be the subject of national consensus. Succeeding Governments will not waste time and energy and resources proving that their predecessor was wrong; they will rather try to get credit for their capacity to implement the agreed programme.

This is the way things are done in the highly successful Scandinavian countries. It is high time that, as a nation, we do things in a more professional way. The university is a good place to start a process of national consensus; it is an institution of learning of vital importance in the life of the nation; it should not be difficult to agree on its role and on the need to give it the means to play that role. It would probably take one year for the task force to agree on a vision, define objectives and draw an implementation programme while ensuring the support of all stake holders.

In the meantime the university should be provided with the financial resources it needs to carry on with its present work without too much stress so that everybody involved can concentrate on the highly important and rewarding task of reinventing the university. I trust that the authorities involved realise that we cannot afford to waste more time in sterile debate, we have to take appropriate action immediately not just for the sake of the university and of its students but also for the key role it has to play if the country is to achieve its dream of becoming a knowledge economy.

<B>Pitch VENKATASAWMY</B>