Every educationist imbued with empathy for the vast spectrum of learners who make up our student community must, at one time or another, grapple with major contradictions in education systems, professed methodologies of teaching, and approved assessment techniques. In fact, systems always fall behind reality, which is dynamic and self-regenerating. Here are some of those contradictions:

● Why can?t the teacher, who is trained along state-of-the-art models of teaching, transfer this training into the class?

● Why is it that, despite all the talk about student-centred teaching, ultimately an education ends up becoming teacher-directed?

● Why does democratising education carry with it a lowering of standards?

● Why can?t teachers reconcile teaching a group of 40 pupils with personal attention to each of the 40? Should massification outdo the need that every child has for personalized teaching?

● Does a national curriculum automatically imply precedence given to the teacher?s oppressive presence in class? Is good teaching a matter of telling children what the case is?

● Why is classroom knowledge much behind the genuine knowledge really needed to live happily in society?

● Does secular education mean that we deprive the child of the most important education ? spiritual education? If I had known at 15 what I have to know at 65, I would have lived a more educated life.

● What has converted education into a commodity, knowledge into power, literacy into admission in an elite society? Why does it continue to remain a merchandise though governments do their best to make it free and compulsory?

● How do we reconcile competition with cooperation and collaboration, which are the cornerstones of survival?

● How can a school allow a child to leave after six years without being able to read and write?

● How can our education system produce more and more dependent learners and fewer autonomous learners? Do schools create the need for private tuition?

● Why can?t we adopt the new configuration for La Gaulette SSS as a part academic, part vocational and technical school for all our institutions because academia alone does not mean distinction?

● Why are the poor who need education left behind by the school while those who are born with better fortune are those who draw the best out of the school?

● Why should some partners relinquish their responsibility and hand over to the school what should have been their prime duty? Moral values, life skills, religious awakening, and polite behaviour ? these constitute the share of parental responsibility. And yet the school is made to shoulder burdens it cannot carry.

● Why do a few who know the new tangled concepts of the sciences lack the common sense to have the most ordinary knowledge about things around them?

● Why do teachers teach according to their model of learning and not according to the way children learn?

Teaching is one of the oldest instances of the power equation between two agents ? teacher and learner. Predatory capitalism, which invades all the strands of human endeavour, has not spared a relationship where the participating agents seek corroboration of interests, correspondence of goals and rapidity in earning dividends. Pedagogy that is at the service of this exchange of goods and services has commoditised knowledge. The poor need remedial education, another means that traders in the profession have invented to make money at the expense of the poor.

The ethics of the elite have influenced the school. While the surface discourse has laid emphasis on the community as a whole, equality of opportunities, on socialisation of the child, the actual practice has been one favouring segregation along class, creed, power and self criteria.

The state in many countries has always tried to reverse the trend by seeking a level playing field for all, but ultimately the vested interests of the elite have had the upper hand. If secularism has acted as a neutralising force, it has only allowed different vested interest ? groups to finally create their own schools leaving public schools for the ?common rabble?.

Academic education still holds sway over public minds and technical and vocational education is still taking the backseat, as Roland Dubois, director of the Industrial and Vocational Training Board (IVTB) said at a prize-giving ceremony in a State school. While the State wants to push a Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) agenda to meet the challenge of globalisation and all-pervasive technology, the population, even if it is made up of the poor, cannot abandon the discourse of the elite, thinking that equality lies in beating the rich at their own game. In the La Gaulette SSS case, the State has decided to ?couper la poire en deux? to placate the mass.

The days when the teacher felt happy with having taught with a meagre remuneration belong to the dead past. In an age where knowledge is power, the teaching community is still keeping students at their mercy. Parents seeks the best teachers and are ready to pay exorbitant fees to whoever can give a competitive edge to their ward. The rules of the game are bound to be vitiated by a teaching community that uses knowledge as wares and learners as customers.

At a philosophical level, the objectives of education, unfortunately, mistaken for schooling (remember that PRB treats teachers as educators) are no longer enlightenment, but money. Scholarships carry the weight of euros needed to finance higher studies in Europe. European degrees still canonized, not because they are worth more than, say, Indian degrees, but because they are obtained at the cost of the earnings of a whole life of the middle-class. The fate of Mauritian students in Ireland and Australia demonstrates the fascination gilded degrees of western countries can exercise on us.

The school is more and more a zone of unease for many. The behaviour of many young people is a crying reminder that the ethos of the UK grammar school is a dead fossil. Unfortunately, even the comprehensive school tried to imitate the grammar school by a simple transposition.

This reminds me of the liberation struggle led by score of women who found no better formula for emancipation than imitating males and emulating their chauvinistic behaviour by making it feminine. The teacher?s status is contested. Pupils and parents find themselves opposite to teachers and not with them as guides, mentors and shapers of the nation?s destiny. Our school leaders still hold the discourse of post-second world war in Europe and the United States.

The violence students perpetrate in European schools is finding its replica in Mauritian ones and we do not seem to be taking the cue. Today teachers are reluctant to go to school whilst yesterday pupils would shy away from it. The values that are estimated in our schools ill-fit the emerging generation. Both the curriculum and pedagogy, both discipline and the values that dictate our leaders are being refused by our youth.

Our youth are not contributing to the debate on education and their needs. If they are, they are the reflections of the world of their elders because young people can mimic their elders to please them. I do not think Suren Dayal?s question concerning the ?Marilyn Mason Culture? is a shot in the dark. He has himself been a teacher and, therefore, he has the sensitivity of someone who can read the barometer of the times.

Education can only reflect our own deeper desires. I do not presume there is a need to suggest solutions because awareness is itself an eye-opener.

<B>Democratisation of education could start with SSS La Gaulette</B>

The very fact that in medieval times ? represent a landmark in human history ? education was meant for the aristocratic elite, knowledge, equated with the contents of religious scriptures, separated the learned from the layman. Education was a tool, which reinforced the bipolarisation of society. It took years of scientific discovery, trade and commerce, as welle as the rise of middle classes to liberate the common man from the shackles of oppression.

● <B>Every country?s history is the world?s history in miniature</B>

The history of education in Mauritius has followed the path traced by civilization as a whole. Every country?s history represents a microcosm just as every metre is a whole path in miniature. Sir Seewoosagar Ramgoolam was the real pioneer of democratisation. By attending a Roman Catholic school, the Hindu he was showed that religious barriers should have no place in education.

As society evolved and became more complex, the frontiers of religion and education, caste, creed made the coexistence of religion and education possible. Numbers exacerbated the division, even if a particular group has two or three schools in its fold. Yet another significant measure of democratisation was the free access for all to secondary education, rich and poor, girl or boy, able or less able, able-bodied or handicapped. But even then access needs to be refined more and more. Navin Ramgoolam has the sterling merit of having brought all primary and secondary schools nearer home though free transport. The MMM doubled the number of State Secondary Schools and made a brisk leap from competition to concepts allying good academic performance with proximity.

● <B>The abolition of competition created a void</B>

The disappearance of cut-throat competition shocked the conservative forces in society. Education has always been viewed as the prime factor of upward mobility. The average Mauritian who has weakened the adversities of post-independence poverty wanted to preserve his acquired rights. The neo-conservatives insisted upon limiting the scope of democratisation.

The conversion of elite schools into Form VI colleges deprived a wide portion of the Mauritian community of an essential mobilizer. From competition at 11, the system became more competitive at 15 or 16. Reaching Form VI already eliminated many from the race. That is why the MMM?s proposal was quashed as soon as a new government came to power. The whole problem was one of time. How fast can we get rid of competition? Is Mauritius ripe for its abolition? It is a question of vision of society, definition of power groups, and vested interests, which dictate education systems.

● <B>Revolutionary proposals </B>

But access is not the only field where democratisation operates. The baptism of a new stream of students who had failed CPE twice as the prevocational stream was a misnomer. In fact, there is little in the prevocational curriculum that makes it live up being an academic one meant for the less able. Curriculum reforms are the soul of change and that is why the model proposed by government for SSS La Gaulette is genuinely revolutionary. An academic curriculum, which runs parallel to a vocational, technical and work- related one is the ideal mix for all students. The reactions of the ?forces vives? are part and parcel of the neo-conservative ethic priorities of a traditional wealth- based society and not of a knowledge-based society. Today knowledge is technology and not the academic abstractions that the aristocratic elite coveted in medieval times.

● <B>Start of curriculum reforms </B>

The people of this region should deem it a privilege that real education reforms are starting at La Gaulette SSS. To reject this proposal because a few are suspecting that a work-related curriculum is being forced upon them out of a presumption of intellectual inferiority are making a serious mistake. 65% of A-level students in Singapore opt for a vocational curriculum. More than 80% of jobs available in the market relate to specific skills needed for Science and Technology.

My personal feeling is that refusing the proposal of government leads to a waste of two years after SC. It is opportune that Cam-bridge is proposing a HSC (professional) to match the traditional A-Level. It is desirable that the MES should think of a three-year post SC diploma or a HSC Professional + a two-year course leading to a diploma.

Parents want to find their children take up employment early in their life. Poverty urges more and more persons to shorten their period of education and training and join the world of work very early. Life-long learning will take care of degrees, post-graduation and doctorates. Completing both education and training at one fell swoop is expensive and unnecessary. We cannot amass all knowledge in one part of our life and expect all returns in the next. Knowledge and training must be gathered throughout one?s life.

● <B>Expected reaction</B>

Seem from a historical perspective, the reaction of society to needed changes is typical of all societies. At first, the thick of the population wants to preserve the past and ensure its permanence. Very few societies have taken the leap at the right time, at the right place. Too much time is wasted in wavering, in negotiating, in back-and-forth movements. The right way is blurred by deeply-rooted prejudices.

● <B> The redeemer accused</B>

La Gaulette SSS, in its new form, would have Form I to Form V classes, a technical and vocational oriented school with a very practical curriculum. Let us not think that an academic curriculum is meant for the well-born and that a vocational curriculum is for ?children of lesser gods?. It is unfortunate that the saviour is being accused of the ills it wants to redeem the people of.

<B>By Santosh Kumar Mahadeo, [email protected]</B>