Jeune Street

A World Bank blog on poverty reduction in Africa features these tidbits from a conference with African finance and education ministers. The keynote speaker was Tharman Shanmugaratnam, finance minister (and former education minister) of Singapore. Highlights:

1. There is a virtuous circle of education and growth, but you need to create it. This means that finance ministers should be concerned about education, and education ministers about economic growth. [At the conference, one participant, when asked a question about education in his country, said "I'm the finance minister, not the education minister."]

2. Singapore emphasized technical and vocational education by giving it prestige that was almost equal to academic education. This involved, among other things, a public relations campaign. As participants at the conference said, in Africa, we also need to deliver on the quality of vocational and technical education.

3. Singapore's insistence on education being a meritocracy (students advance purely on merit) has led to equity. For instance, the top 5 percent of the students come from 95 percent of the schools. But to make this work, the education system needs to be insulated from politics. As Tharman said, the role of political leaders is to keep politics out of education.

Of course, the question is really about what kind of education helps to bring prosperity to a country. You see a lot of aid dollars going to fund technical education programmes that are aimed to create highly specialized human resources for a country. But a population is more than just a mechanical labour force to be carefully calibrated. This education-economy nexus discourse needs to be connected in some way with the broader governance discourse that has taken root in development thinking. The governance discourse is based on more than 20 years of research (a lot of it drawing from African experiences) showing that economic growth is related to the quality of institutions and the rule of law.

As the recent economic crisis has taught us, these institutional pillars of our economy rest on the ethics and values that are taught in our schools. Lord Layard wrote an influential editorial in the Financial Times several months ago making this very argument:

Accelerated economic growth is not a goal for which we should make large sacrifices. In particular, we should not sacrifice the most important source of happiness, which is the quality of human relationships – at home, at work and in the community. We have sacrificed too many of these in the name of efficiency and productivity growth.

Most of all we have sacrificed our values. In the 1960s, 60 per cent of adults said they believed “most people can be trusted”. Today the figure is 30 per cent, in both Britain and the US. The fall in trustworthy behaviour is clear in the banking sector but can also be seen in family life (more break-ups), in the playground (fewer friends you can trust) and in the workplace (growing competition between colleagues).