New York Time recent articles A College Education Without Job Prospects just pointed a problem commonly faced by 3rd world country : spoon-feed nature and unplanned educational system.
The spoon-feeding tertiary educational system is easy to implement, but the consequences are dire. Unprepared, the graduate can never cope with the real world that required constantly updates of skill and self-improvement.
On the tertiary education system, unplanned education with updated syllabus is WORST than planned educational system with outdated material/syllabus. After all, education is preparing the student to grabs the basic theory, building the knowledge foundation to handling future job challenge.
“Planning education” is a tough job itself. Those with the capability to shape the education system should have co-ordinate with respective ministry long term plan. For example, if the government are mean to transform into Agro-centric, bio-diversity and engineering self proficiency country in next 10-20 years, they must start transform the school system to cope with the vision. Taking the example, the education ministry must start the transformation in secondary school, break the current science/art/commerce stream system to specialize level such as agro / bio / information/ engineering / accounting etc.
Because current education system are not prepared for the changes, “transition” such as polytechnic school should be establish soonest possible to buffer the changes. In future, each secondary school should specialize on no more than three field (e.g. agro/information, agro/bio/communication, infomation/law/accounting,etc). Such system will make the student more tertiary prepare to ensure future job readiness.
In short, 3rd world country should start transit away from generic education system from the secondary level towards planned-economy specialize level. This will make sure the country will not unbalanced workforce – oversupply in generic field but failed to produce enough specialize to fulfill the market demands.
Unfortunately, I don’t think any 3rd world country will going to materialize such idea. As what I see at the moment, the 3rd world politikus are more interested to stay in power than bringing positive changes to the country.