6% of GDP in State Investment for Education
August 4, 2012, 5:34 pm
. the sundayisland
by Ahilan Kadirgamar
In presenting the recommendations
of the Special Committee on Education to the State Council in 1944,
C.W.W. Kannangara, then the Minister of Education, famously rephrased
the quote of a 19th century Scottish jurist and politician: "Sir, it
was the boast of the great Augustus that he found Rome of brick and
left it of marble. How much nobler will that be for this State Council
when we shall be able to say that we found education expensive and left
it cheap; that we found it in a sealed book and left it in an open
letter; that we found it the patrimony of the rich and left it the
inheritance of the poor."
The reforms that led to decades of
free education in this country were drafted by a multi-ethnic
Committee of 23 educationists. The Committee existed for three years
with sittings in Jaffna, Kandy, Galle, Batticaloa and Colombo.
Sessional Paper 24, the Report of the Committee, reflected a wide range
of concerns and provided the grounds for a national policy on
education. The strength of the Report was its breadth of analysis and
its grounding in issues facing education in Ceylon at that time.
However, it was able to make a major mark on education in the country
by channelling those broader concerns into an unequivocal demand for
free education.
Today, almost 70 years later, free education
is under attack and on the brink of destruction. Although the
Government postponed a secretly drafted and controversial private
education bill that met with much protest in January, it has been
complicit, together with successive governments, in propelling the slow
death of free education. State investment in education is at an all
time low of 1.9% of GDP. When educational spending is so low, in fact
one of the lowest in the world, private education is supported and
promoted by default. It is the wealthier classes that can augment a
poorly funded public education system with private services by sending
their children to expensive tuition classes, international schools, or
additional diploma courses and putting them through private academies
or universities abroad. This is where the call for 6% of GDP in state
investment for education by the Federation of University Teachers
Associations (FUTA) is a demand worthy of support. It deserves
admiration in line with the recommendation of Kannangara and his
Committee on Education for free education in the 1940s.
While
there are many other demands and a whole range of issues that FUTA is
engaging with, - including the political appointments of
administrators, militarisation of university space, the Z-score fiasco
and the shutting down of rural schools - topics on which many academics
have prolifically written about in recent weeks, in this article, I
wish to specifically address the political economy of the 6% demand.
FUTA’s 6% demand, one of the most insightful political demands in our
recent history, is being shunned or dismissed by mainstream economists
for ideological reasons. Given the complicity of the mainstream
economic establishment in the escalation of the global economic crisis,
and their current push towards further austerity and cuts to social
welfare in the West, the dismissal of neoclassical economists or the
positions of neoliberal international agencies such as the World Bank
and IMF should not deter us from exploring the 6% demand.
Rethinking GDP and Economic Growth
The
FUTA call for 6%, initially a demand of 5,000 university teachers, is
now burgeoning into one that encompasses the concerns of 230,000 school
teachers, over four million students, their families as well as the
broader citizenry. The 6% demand is thus becoming a demand of the public
and about our society. Will this public demand be able to open our
imagination to think in radically different ways about the economy? For
example, what percent of our GDP should the government invest in
health, the other pillar of our society? How do such demands on the
state for social welfare relate to our social expectations of the
economy? And what do GDP and economic growth mean beyond being measures
of the total goods and services produced in this country? And, more
importantly, who benefits from such economic growth?
The
Government boasts 8% GDP growth and US$ 2,800 per capita GDP last year.
But what do these numbers mean when between 2005 and 2010 education as
a percentage of GDP has fallen from 2.9% to 1.9% and expenditure per
university student as a ratio of per capita income has fallen from 130%
to 70%? The tenure of the Rajapaksa Government has so far been
characterised by an attack on education and social welfare more
broadly. These changes are neither accidental nor inevitable as some
economists and Government propagandists would like to have us believe.
Rather, it reflects the priorities of the Government.
Looking
at recurrent expenditure, including the salaries of teachers, versus
capital expenditure, the longer term investment in educational
development including for example in school and university buildings,
would give us a better idea of the Governmentpriorities. Taken
together, capital expenditure on education and health amounts to only
10% of capital expenditure on all other infrastructure. Indeed, the
build out of roads and ports we see all over the country is a much
higher priority for the Government than the essential social
infrastructures of education and health. While the capital expenditure
in transport and communication was less than three times the capital
expenditure on education in 2005, by 2011 it had risen sharply to over
eight times that on education. According to the Finance Ministry’s
Annual Report the total projected capital investment from 2012 to 2016
is Rs. 125 billion for education and Rs. 132 billion for health, but a
staggering Rs. 803 billion for roads. All this points to a major shift
in the priorities of the Government, with less and less being spent on
social welfare.
The 6% demand also pushes us to think about
the meaning of GDP and economic growth, and who it serves. Transforming
public education into a booming private business to serve the
wealthier classes in this country as well as foreign students who can
afford the high fees, would admittedly contribute towards GDP growth.
But would it serve broader society? This is where there is a clear and
important distinction between state investment in education as a
percentage of GDP and private sector share of education as a percentage
of GDP. The private education bill and the promotion of private
universities will increase private sector share of education as a
percentage of GDP as well as contribute towards GDP growth. However,
such private universities due to their high costs will only serve the
wealthy. Furthermore, the state university system accessible to the
broader citizenry will also be undermined as university lecturers are
poached by higher paying private universities.
Resisting Neoliberal Policies
The
important question is why these cuts to social welfare are taking
place now and where they are coming from. Austerity measures that
restrict the Budget and stipulate cuts to education and social welfare
are part of a larger neoliberal class project serving the interests of
finance capital. The neoliberal policies of privatisation and austerity
favour financialisation of the economy in order to reward global
finance capital and the local financial elite. These policies
facilitate the accumulation of capital with profits accruing to the
financial sector from all other sectors of the economy. Such neoliberal
accumulation ravages social welfare by transforming public
institutions for education and health into profit making enterprises. In
other words, what in our recent history was claimed to be peoples
entitlements in the form free education, with the onslaught of private
education will indebt families as they are forced to take loans and
even mortgage and sell their homes to educate their children.
Furthermore, our education system was built with decades of collective
social efforts and social investment. Now, with the process of
privatisation, this educational inheritance of the people will be
dispossessed in order for financiers backing educational businesses to
make profits.
The neoliberalisation of education,
characteristic of the neoliberal process of "accumulation by
dispossession", has become prevalent in many countries around the
world, particularly in the West, with cuts to education accelerating in
the context of the global economic crisis. With student debt in
Western countries mounting, education has become a severe burden on the
youth rather than enabling their social and economic future. And, this
is where, merely looking for models of education in the West or the
functioning of Western universities as the path to revitalise education
in Sri Lanka, is bound to be disastrous. Indeed, back in the 1940s,
Kannangara and his Committee were cautious in assessing the models in
the UK, the US and the West when insisting on free education in Ceylon:
"Few
will disagree with the proposition that education in a democratic
society should be free at all stages. Talents and ability are not
confined to any social class or group and any social system must provide
for their emergence by the provision of equal educational
opportunities. ... It may be asked why these progressive and advanced
democracies have not thought of making education completely free, i.e.,
from kindergarten up to and including the University stage. ... But
partly influenced by financial considerations very few countries, even
of the West, have made secondary education free for all entrants, and
Universities which offer free education are exceptional."
If
in the late colonial period, our visionary educationists could think
beyond such models, certainly we can also chart a different path from
the currently dominant neoliberal policies transforming education.
Furthermore, FUTA’s 6% demand is one they also recognize will take time,
a demand that for now requires a commitment from the Government
towards step by step increases in state investment. As some researchers
have written and historical data shows, between 1954 and 1964, Sri
Lanka’s investment in education rose from 2.6% to 4.6% of GDP. So, even
from our own history, there is a precedent for the viability of the 6%
demand, provided there is political will on the part of the
Government.
The reality unfortunately is that the Rajapaksa
Government is not interested in addressing the crisis in education. Not
only has the Government dragged negotiations with FUTA in recent weeks
despite the crippling strike, but ironically reflecting the priorities
of the Government, the President recently held a meeting with
stockbrokers which was followed by the Finance Secretary meeting twice
with the financial sector. The Government claims to be seeking their
input for the next Budget, but perhaps their interest is in propping up
the stock market? The FUTA struggle is then being waged, not only in
the context of the crisis in education, but also in the backdrop of the
hegemony of finance capital. Therefore, FUTA’s trade union action and
particularly its 6% demand, needs public support to transform it into a
long term national struggle of the citizenry, a struggle that must
recognise education as the "inheritance of the poor" built over decades
by previous generations.
