Re-Thinking Vanuatu Education Together (review)

This timely and very important collection of studies and essays on schooling and education in Vanuatu brings together researchers, and most importantly, primarily ni-Vanuatu who are on the "front lines" of educational practice, to describe, assess, and critique contemporary schooling and suggest dramatic changes for the future. Although specifically and expertly focused on local conditions, this book is strikingly applicable to the Pacific Basin as a whole.Yet anyone working in third world educational contexts—whether in the so-called "developing" world or in economically poor areas of the so-called "developed" world—will find that the issues, problems, dreams, and struggles of administrators, teachers, and students are virtually the same everywhere.

Kabini Sanga (Solomon Islander, University of Wellington) and John Niroa (ni-Vanuatu, Ministry of Education, Port Vila) begin the introduction by quoting the latest indictment of formal, westernized education in the Pacific: "three decades of considerable investments in education has not made a significant impact on the educational developments of Pacific communities" (FPene, 'A Taufe'ulangaki, and C Benson in Tree of Opportunity: Re-Thinking Pacific Education, published by University of the South Pacific, 2002, 1). Sanga and Niroa describe the revolutionary conference, "Re-thinking Vanuatu Education Together in 2002, " held in the wake of a 2001 regional colloquium on Pacific education at the University of the South Pacific, Suva. From that 2001 conference, two findings emerged: "in spite of decades of educational development, Pacific peoples have not owned the formal education process but have instead viewed it as alien and imposed from outside"; and "Pacific peoples have failed to develop clearly articulated visions for their educational and developmental pathways" (15). Obviously, the two are interconnected, but it is difficult to see how Pacific peoples could have felt they "owned" education when (as the editors and several authors in the volume point out) schooling over the past 100 years has been largely shaped by outside consultants from the "developed" world—where, ironically, the economically and socially privileged benefit most from schooling. Vanuatu was the first Pacific Island nation to take up the challenges issued by the 2001 colloquium, and this book is the outcome of that initiative.

The book's twenty-eight chapters and authors cover the challenge of changing schooling in Vanuatu: language(s), policy, expenditure/ investment, education levels, nonformal education, curriculum, relationships of schools to community and families, research and planning, and finally, recommendations for the future. A list of primary, secondary, and tertiary schools with maps and many photographs of educational contexts enrich the book. As it is not possible to do justice to the book's breadth and depth in a short review, Iwill consider the recommendations that come from the authors. In so many ways these recommendations are those that all of us concerned with Pacific Islands education have made for years, now adjusted to current situations, but if anything, more pressing than ever: the need for more primary schools in rural areas; the need to maintain a teacher-student ratio of no more than 1 to 30 —which is already less than ideal but at least preferable to conditions at many schools now; the need to distribute students more evenly between rural and urban schools. Behind this last need is the imbalance in resources between fairly well financed urban schools and poorly financed and staffed rural schools, which leads parents to try to get their children into urban schools. Links between and the engagement of parents are needed. The school day should be lengthened or shifts created to better utilize facilities. Nongovernmental organizations should be encouraged to set up private schools financed outside the public system, to relieve stresses on the national budget. While these recommendations are focused on Vanuatu, many are relevant to schools throughout the Pacific Islands.

However, embedded in the...