When did Adult Education disappear?

J. Roughan

22 October 2010

Honiara

Each and every political party which contested last August's national election, made a special point to stress the need to seriously increase the education budget. The promise made was crystal clear! If a particular political party formed the nation's newest government, then it promised to spend big bucks on education.

The present coalition government, NCRA—made up of at least six political parties--was no exception. It put teeth into its education promise in its recently published Policy Statement. NCRA "considers education as a key ingredient in all spheres of human development".  Its Policy Statement details what it means by saying it "will fund tertiary education, including scholarship for SICHE", "recognizes the importance of promoting distant learning" and give serious consideration "to establish a National University of Solomon Islands".

However, lost in all this education shuffle is the vital place of Adult Education in the lives of our Olos. Of course tertiary, secondary, primary and pre-school education lie at the heart of keeping our nation up to the mark and running well. And the mantra that 'today's youth are tomorrow's leaders' is whole heartedly accepted! We know in almost backward fashion that our youth population makes up more than half of all our people. And it makes perfect sense to focus on youth, their education needs and what future the nation faces if it fails to educate its youth.

Yet, it's the Olos, not the kids, who still control the nation's resource base. They are the ones who must say "Yes!" if the land is to be used for oil palms, coconuts, cocoa, etc. But, here we are well into the 21st century and the Olos education base, compared to ten years ago at the turn of the century, has improved very little. Yes, you say, these Olos are close up to the grave, in fact many of them have one foot in it, so why pay attention to what they say or don't say. Well, let me inform you loud and clear that if we continue to try to get around them, dismiss their importance or just don't listen, then nothing will happen. Malaita gave us a clear signal!

In the 2006 Sogavare Government, great effort was expended to have Malaitan landowners sign on the dotted line to allow their land holdings be used for new palm oil plantings. The government at the time spent big bucks trying to accomplish this task but at no time that I am aware of was there serious attention given to discoursing the land issue with landowners, making them aware of the importance of this type of planting, etc. Too often raising land owners awareness, the resource owners concern, was too often simply a matter of waving bunches of dollars in front of them. Then, we expected then to jump at the bait. Well we all know what happened! Here it is four years later and not a single, solitary oil palm has been planted on Malaita.

When the Colonial Government became serious about establishing formal education in the Protectorate in the 1960s, things took off. When I first arrived on the scene, for example, the school fee at that time--1958--was two sticks of tobacco which I would hand over to a child's father to allow me to take his child to school at Tarapaina in South Malaita. By mid 1980s, however, school fees were no longer a few sticks of tobacco. They had jumped to hundreds and in some cases even thousands of dollars per year. Island people had been convinced of the worth of education and were willing to shell out large amounts of cold, hard cash to buy into the system.

Of course paying school fees was an accepted investment. People's reasoning was clear enough: have my child get a solid education and the world of work, paid employment, income and salaries, opened up for the educated student. The pain, sacrifice and hard work of getting enough money to pay school fees became an acceptable reality. This investment, after a few years, would begin to pay off for the family, uncles, aunts, relatives and wantoks who had scraped together the necessary school fees.

Why hasn't this same logic been followed in the case of oil palms and other large scale cash crop plantings? First of all little or no land was in question when school fees entered the picture. Families across the nation eagerly bought into this new thing called  education. People could    experience almost on a daily basis that the educated person had advantages and little was lost of any real wealth, their land and its resources. The world as they knew it and had lived by since childhood had not changed.by going to this new thing called school.  

But giving over large tracks of precious land for many years to perfect strangers really attacks the very basis of how they think this world works. The only reality for the typical Olo is the land and its resource base. Few if any of them stash cash under the bed, even fewer operate cheque  accounts or have IBD deposits with the banking system. All they have in this world is what they rest their feet on each day, gather their daily food intake and are comforted constantly, their land.

Taking that security away from them is like asking them to start off a new life in a foreign country. Yet, I do feel change is in the air. The Olo is not stupid, not dumb but is searching for a new way of remaining on his beloved land, living off it and still preserving a way of life that, although new in some respects, has a great deal of the old still sticking to it. That's where Adult Education must come into the lives of Olos. Less than 50 years ago many of them embraced a new way of living when they worked hard to get school fees. These same Olos are open to change but the nation has to help them find this new world which guarantees a way of life which protects their most precious gift, the land, and a people's future.