The world is becoming a global village. That sentence is full of meaning, specially for us living on an island far from other countries and having limited natural resources.

The move towards the creation of the global village started centuries ago when countries were linked through the sea by boats mainly for the purpose of trade. Goods moved from country to country and linked mostly the traders. Then came the industrial era when owners of capital looked for better opportunities elsewhere to maximise profits and we had the establishment of multinationals in countries where they could take advantage of the local conditions – raw materials as well as cheap labour.

Such development was facilitated through the help of better telecommunications and the advent of fax machines, which allowed for the transmission of the orders and designs over the telephone network.

The end of the last century saw the development and laying of fibre optic cables, which have connected the world and made communication much faster and more reliable. Today we have the development of the Information and Communication Technology sector which combines the use of telecommunication and information technology to provide the broad-band access, which facilitates fast transmission of voice, data and video. Such a development has again changed the shape of the world - it has become flatter. Culture and language, which formerly helped identify persons coming from a country or region, can no longer be used for that purpose. Somebody living in Mauritius may speak with an American or British accent quite comfortably and it is difficult for somebody on the phone to locate the place of residence of such a person just by listening to a telephone conversation.

<B>We are all impressed by the economic growth of Singapore. The country benefited from the vision of the leaders who set into place schemes to attract ‘back’ the natives who were working abroad.</B>

Formerly we were living in a world with many boundaries, local, regional, international and we were finding solutions to suit the environment we lived in. Very rarely we were concerned with development in other parts of the world. We were not competing in a world environment. We could do our job at our own pace and still get paid for it.

In such a world with boundaries, mediocrity could still earn us a wage; gradually with the flattening of the world and the disappearance of boundaries, competition has taken all its importance. Consequently this has impacted on the development of human resources and the role of the education system in meeting the manpower needs. In the old days, the aim of the education provided was to meet the needs of the different countries – that is how for a long time we have had a number of international bodies recommending the development of agriculture and the promotion of agricultural education in the developing world; with the advent of multinationals, there was a need to open up the education system to meet the needs of the multinationals as well, as very often they provided job opportunities for local people. Hence, changes had to be brought to the school curriculum to take care of the much broader and new needs.

We want to transform Mauritius so that we form part of the knowledge economy. The knowledge industry is expanding very fast. It is estimated that the amount of data available is doubling every 20 months; the capacity to process data is doubling every 18 months. 50% of the knowledge in the Electronic Data Processing sector gets obsolete in less than a year. In such a situation what can be the role of education? The carrying out of a major reform of the curriculum is most welcome - which by the way has to be constantly evolving - to meet new challenges. I shall write more about the curriculum and its development in another article. We shall for the present stick to the system of education we need in this modern world. One of the major aims is to produce outputs, which would better fit in the new environment. The world has become more competitive and constant restructuring is occurring in the work place making employment characterised by flexibility, instability and uncertainty. Hence the ‘education’ acquired at school will need to be adapted to this new situation. What is the impact of this globalisation and the technological changes on our education system? We are in a small country with our greatest asset being our people. Hence, for us to be in the competitive race we need to have the ‘individual’ qualified to world standard.

In a country like the USA, which generates more innovative ideas than any other country in the world there are bout 2% of the population with ‘entrepreneurial ideas’. Out of the 2%, 0.75 - 1% may be coming from outside the US. A significant proportion of the university professors working in the US were not born there, but were the engines of economic growth. In a normal population we may have about 1% of the population with innovative ideas and they are very often the propellers of development. In case we want to be in the race we need to cultivate the 1% and try to increase it. Otherwise we may slow down progress and the country as well. Examples from the world abound to support the foundation of this statement. Africa is still stalling behind in development and at the same time there are many brilliant Africans working elsewhere adding to the brains and ideas of the other countries. We are all impressed by the economic growth of Singapore. Apart from a strong leadership the country also benefited from the vision of the leaders who in the early eighties set into place schemes to attract ‘back’ to Singapore the natives who were working in the USA, UK, etc. Hence they brought back the ‘brains’ to grow. They may have increased the “1%” by attracting other brains from the region and thus providing Singapore with a leading competitive edge. The motto is becoming more “not follow the money but follow the brains”.

I am tempted here to mention the contribution of the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) graduates to the US economy. The MIT graduates have created some 4,000 companies employing some 1.1 billion people. Things like that, if left to happen by themselves, will take centuries but, with a push, they occur within a lifetime. This is a good example of how the cultivation of the brain in a conducive environment leads to the growth of an economy, even a country.

We are moving to develop the service sector and promote the growth of the knowledge economy. In practice, that means we need to take our people as far as possible up the educational ladder. Hence the policy to make schooling for all children up to the age of 16 years compulsory fits into this new world economic order. Gradually we will have to move further up the ladder as competition keeps following us.

We need, at the same time, to ensure that we cultivate the brains, make the individuals ready to compete in the global race and ensure that all the children get the best education possible for them to survive in a world 10 - 20 years from now. There is no bettter way of doing things.

<B>Suresh MUNBODH</B>

Former director, IVTB