Too many obstacles in education

Editorial

THE education sector will continue to experience problems at all levels from elementary to tertiary.
These problems in part are unavoidable for a developing economy such as Papua New Guinea.
Perhaps the biggest challenge that faces the government is how to build the capacity to allow the system to cater for everyone.
Free education and the issue of project fees is only one problem the state should deal with.
It is now clearer that that the number of learning institutions simply cannot accommodate the growing ranks of students pouring into the secondary and tertiary levels on a yearly basis.
In pre-Independence times, the challenge that faced the colonial government was building up the ranks of skilled workers among the local population to eventually take over the Australian administration.
The challenge then was really about getting as many of the best and brightest students to study and train to become the nation’s first administrators and managers as well as filling in the other positions in society in health, education, industry and so on.
But in today’s time, it is the other way around. There are a lot more students, many of them bright, capable and keen to learn to better themselves, but they are faced with a range of challenges, one of which is the limited number of spaces available.
With the bottleneck forming at the university/college level, the system has responded with a quota system to deal with the space problem.
This quota system has been achieved twofold. First, there is the grade point average system and then there is the selection criteria in which students, in their year 12 school lever form, pick their top-three preferred institutions.
These are default screening processes enforced to select the good from the best.
When students are selecting their top three, it is generally understood that the first choice is the one that counts. The second and third choices can no longer earn you a space in a tertiary institution.
Many have blamed economic mismanagement as an underlying cause of the State’s inability to cater for all students.
In many developed, and even some developing nations, the State cannot get students to go to school and stay in school, while in this country, students have to earn the grade, with the GPA sometimes seen as a moving
target, generally moving upwards.
But before that, the battle to get educated begins at the elementary and primary school levels where the conditions are not always conducive to learning, with over-crowding and lack of resources the usual obstacles.
This is a reason why the PNG Teachers’ Association has called on the Education Department to set an official target for teacher-to-pupil ratio to achieve quality education.
The third challenge facing students has nothing to do with their ability. It is about money.
The amount charged by schools, especially private institutions, are restrictive and do not necessarily account for the background of the student despite his or her ability.
These are the main challenges facing the State. The good news is that they all can be addressed.