TVET and our skills ‘fetish’

It was a joyous celebration when I got GPA 5 in my SSC examination, as is the case in most homes in Bangladesh when the results of this milestone exam come out. I remember being sent to visit elderly relatives with sweets in the evening, a feeling of relief and content in my heart. Our driver chacha was also very happy, not only for my result but also for his son's result. His son had studied in a school in their village home far from Dhaka, and he had obtained GPA 5 too. His achievement, I knew, was more special than mine, because he had not studied with as many facilities as I had.

That day, both of us were celebrating the same achievement, but two things differed greatly between us – our journeys leading up to that point and our journeys from thereon. I wondered whether he, like me, was continuously being asked what I wanted to become, which field I was heading towards. Out of interest, I excitedly asked driver chacha what his son's aspirations were, and he replied with a fallen enthusiasm, "For him, there aren't many options, Ma. He must quickly get a job. He's smart but the reality is that students like him, like me, need to be practical. I think he should just try to pick up a skill, in a vocational institution maybe." I could almost hear the despair in his voice, his far-off look reminiscent of imagining his son being given the bright opportunities I would automatically be given. The air reeked of unfairness, and I didn't feel so proud anymore. Why was I entitled to more options than someone my age, just as talented as me, just because I was born to more privilege?

If you look closely, you will find, like I have, that there is an inherent bias in our thinking when we imagine the aspirations and career trajectories of students from different socio-economic backgrounds. While who chooses to pursue technical and vocational education and training (TVET) as an educational route over general or religious education is an important question, an equally important – if not more important – question is for whom TVET was imagined. Also, who gets to make these decisions of who goes to which education stream? Is it the case that only a handful of our elite and powerful are making these decisions for countless lives without often hearing or understanding the voices of different groups? Indeed, it very well may be that there is an underrepresentation of voices in this sort of decision-making, especially at the topmost levels. At the end of the day, the question that becomes important is whether there is a "privilege" factor at play within the system and, thereby, an inherent bias and inequality in our thinking. We must ask, and answer, why privilege or poverty should filter individuals into either TVET or general education.

The TVET route is undoubtedly a necessary educational option for countries like Bangladesh that are looking to "upskill" and turn humans into "human capital."

The TVET route is undoubtedly a necessary educational option for countries like Bangladesh that are looking to "upskill" and turn humans into "human capital." However, it's important to remember the "human" part of it and not get lost in the "capital" of it all. The most common and established narratives around education and skills today is that we need to invest more in TVET, and we need to "attract" and "normalise" pursuing TVET. But do we mean for everyone or only for the lesser privileged? Would we send our own children to TVET?

Also, it's important to be aware of the origins of TVET and the global, more Western, push for countries in the Global South to strongly promote TVET. Sadly, there is little criticality from the receiving end – from us. The possibility that too much and blind focus on TVET may have more cons than pros rarely comes to our mind. We, the Global South, in a way, are still colonised in our minds by the Global North because we blindly follow their lead without realising that our context, culture and history are different from theirs. There's also a lot to think about in terms of what we mean by skills and whether the more "one size fits all" approach of TVET is the right step towards the right direction. Educationist Lisa Wheelahan talks about this in her article on the reification of skills and identifies one of the key issues as the fetishisation of skills, meaning that we have turned the need for skills into more of a fetish without understanding what we actually mean by the term. Then there's the related nuances that we remain unaware of – who should have what skills, what skills are the need of the time, and for what type of work. All this has led to the reification, as Wheelahan et al (2022) calls it, of the whole concept.

Remember, education can include training, but education and training cannot be one and the same. If skills are what we desire from an education, why have we not concentrated on the upskilling of general education? Why focus on TVET as the sole medium for employable skills instead? We must realise that we have, knowingly or unknowingly, created an unequal filtering system. You come from a lesser privileged family and need a job and money, go for TVET. Give up your dream of studying to become a doctor or a scientist, or studying at an academic university like your old man always said he dreamt for you. There's something wrong in the way we've been thinking of these educational routes in Bangladesh, and we must change our thinking if we want to match our actions to what we say about inclusive development. For any inclusive development to be indeed inclusive, we must first learn to imagine all of us on a same-level platform, deserving of the same educational opportunities and the same standard quality of life.

Rubaiya Murshed is a PhD researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She is also a lecturer (on study leave) at the Department of Economics, University of Dhaka. 

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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