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The conventional wisdom that governs our view of the future dictates that a good job is the end result of education and studies. Natural progression means that anyone who helps themselves, studies and takes advantage of the formal structure of education will at the end be rewarded with a fulfilling career. This is path allows for no deviation and for the time being it is the only one we make available to our young people.
This age-old wisdom has in the past decade or so come under constant attack as its foundational tenets have been ripped apart. There are hundreds of millions of young people across the world with high-calibre tertiary level education who cannot find a job.
The latest figures from the European Union point to a record 17.5 million people without a job. Much closer to home the figures are less clear as there is intense disguised employment and I do not doubt a lot of fiddling is done with the unemployment rate to make the situation look better than it is. One does not need official figures to know that there are too many young educated people right now in Trinidad and Tobago who are unemployed or underemployed. The promise of a bright future is dim for many across the globe and this situation is even bleaker in our nation.
Probably the best piece of simple statistical reporting that brings home the plight of the youth of the modern world is the statement that this generation of young people in Europe and the USA is going to be the first generation since the Industrial Revolution to earn less than their parents.
Whilst much of the data is being generated about the European Union and the US the same holds true across the globe. The emerging powerhouse nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) along with Turkey, Indonesia and others are at the moment doing well for themselves but their growth is slowing as the complex fabric of the global economy causes pain in certain regions — in this case the EU and US — to spread throughout the entire global economic system.
Already India's growth has slowed, China is trying to slow its own growth for economic reasons and Brazil and others are also experiencing a cooling off. In these vast countries of hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of people, the youths are facing the brunt of economic hardship. The young people from Morocco who set themselves on fire to protest unemployment are being joined by the angry youths of Tahrir Square in Egypt who toppled the Mubarak regime, the austerity-savaged youths of Barcelona, Athens, Montreal and millions of others across the globe, are crying out for work and the future that was promised to them.
The old set of paths that were created during the Industrial Revolution to feed the capitalist system has failed in the modern world in many places. The education system in Trinidad and Tobago and in many other nations great and small is designed to produce students who become units of production in the global capitalist order. These units are divided in school according to age and sometimes ability and are taught a set curriculum. No attention is given to different learning styles, interests and abilities. At the end of the entire process of education, just like in a factory, students are spat out and filtered into a particular slot for a particular purpose.
The problem in the past decade or so has been that the "purpose" which students were prepared for has changed fundamentally and in some cases does not exist. Education systems prepared students for manufacturing jobs which no longer exist, for tourism sectors which have been altered, for service industries which have outpaced education etc. Basically the education system was lagging behind the economy.The current global situation is one where having an education is not equivalent to having a job.
Closer to home we are witnessing a very interesting turn of events. The public service has traditionally been the refuge and domain of those who are educated usually up to ordinary O'Level and, recently, A'Levels. With the advent of free tertiary education and the global crisis there has been a full scale storming of the public sector by university graduates. The consequence of this is twofold. Firstly, these university graduates will hopefully benefit the nation by adding value and expertise to the system, the other is that those with minimal qualifications who would have traditionally worked in the public sector have been displaced. This class of displaced youths are joined by those who could not find work at all but hold degrees, leading to untold thousands without jobs or a future.
How exactly are we going to deal with all of the young people who have no job and no future prospects? The answers are not simple and for now no one has figured out exactly what to do. There can only be so many OJT positions and state jobs. The classic answer would be to increase production but this is far easier said than done. Another answer is to make tertiary education more selective, which is unpopular and elitist and still does not address the many thousands who have no interest in a university education. Another alternative would be to encourage technical and vocational training in fields that we have vacancies for such as oil and gas in our country. This however does not address the problem of what happens when the oil runs out. We followed the advice given to us, to build a knowledge economy and we have done so, producing thousands of bright students with advanced training yet we have no place for them. For the many millions across the globe the future is not so bright and tomorrow is not something that is looked forward to anymore.
Rajiv Gopie won the President's Medal in 2006 for business/modern studies. He is an MSc candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics.
rajivgopie@hotmail.com
