4 Scenarios for the Mauritian Education Sector in 2022

Growth 

This scenario looks at the Mauritian Education system as a graduate production machine achieving the vision of Government of one graduate per family. In this scenario, intellectuals will be formed at a constantly increasing rate irrespective of their primary and secondary schooling foundations. Skilled labor will be on shortage on the market and more and more graduates will be forced to do blue-collar jobs and manual jobs to earn a living thereby creating a sense of frustration and inequality of chances. People with MBAs will be driving taxis and others with a degree in Food Science will become hawkers. The entrepreneurial culture will be strengthened but with a mitigated sentiment that Government has fooled around with the future of the graduates. On the other hand Mauritian intellectuals will form the core of the so-called knowledge hub where human resources will be exported to Africa from Mauritius where a number of economies are prospering. Growth of the education sector to serve the region and the African continent can make education services as one of the emergent pillars of the new Mauritian economy.

Constraint 

In this scenario, the status-quo is being maintained. In essence the education system will look like the same it was as today except with some cosmetic improvements. Schools will be flooded with computer hardware and software but most of them would be obsolete and require update. Teachers will still be asking for new types of training to be able to master the technology, because the technology that they were used to during their teacher training periods is no longer in place. In 2022, in the constraint scenario, ICT will still be at experimental level in schools and Government promises will have moved from offering a laptop per child policy to a tablet per child policy to now a mobile phone per child policy. In reality the curriculum will not have changed in its essence except that new subjects would be added to overload the learner and therefore maintain the same problem of pass rates and output rates from successive education levels. 

Collapse (contributed by Rubina Rampersad)

In order to please the different lobbies in the Mauritian context, educational reforms are piecemeal and “too little and too late”. The Certificate in Primary Education (CPE) has not been revamped: cosmetic changes were made. Wherever overhauling was proposed, voices were raised by X or Y Community making the government go back on archaic methodologies. The result is that in 2020, we still have a nation of followers instead of innovators and creators. We depend on others to find solutions to our local problems. Moreover, in a globalised world, instead of using our promised world-class education to produce citizens who can ‘export’ their skills, and knowhow to others, and/or solve our local problems, the government has to depend on exogenous expertise and technology in developing the following: growing staple foods that require low irrigation, finding ways and means to have a manufacturing industry that was not water –greedy, development of renewable sources of energy as there was urgency to save funds for high priority projects such as food and water. Even in the ICT /BPO sector, local people work on the lower rungs of the organization whereas the highest paid positions where the “knowledge workers”, the creators and innovators are, come from overseas. The CPE exams have doomed generations by making them rote learners who accumulate information but do not know how to transform and deconstruct that knowledge. Foreign labour are fast gnawing the job market by taking up the best positions and this is leading to a new form of colonialism. The food and water crises further exacerbate the ‘rigid’ nature of schools as schools become more militaristic and authoritarian to justify their status quo. Since the economic conditions are bad, there are pressures to do more with less, with schools trying to maintain the status quo rather than experimenting in new teaching and learning methodology where the centre would become the learner. This becomes the ‘less risky” and safest approach in highly febrile context, both social and economic.Our own “brains”, given fierce global and regional trends, have migrated in search for better opportunities. 

Transformation 

The ideal scenario for 2022 is the transformation of the education system into the schools without walls concept where much of the knowledge acquisition phase will take place at home through interactive curriculum that is tailor made and distributed over interactive digital broadcast networks such as IPTV and the internet. Schools would become places where important life skills will be taught such as moral values, community living and other socially related activities will be taught. The Mauritian school will be temple of Life Arts which makes individuals better and smarter citizens. Our learners have found the Holy Grail for surviving in a globalised village: lifelong learning skills to find ever- innovative and creative solutions, but never losing their uniqueness as Mauritians, which in fact gives them an additional edge.