BURMA: Junta Gets Failing Marks in Educating Youth

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Satya Sivaraman

RANGOON, Oct 5 1997 (IPS) - Nearly 10 months after the Burmese junta closed down all universities and colleges because of campus unrest, thousands of students have been left with little prospect of completing their formal education.

The vaccum created by the closure of state-run institutions has led to a surge in private “teaching shops” but many students are unable to afford their high fees. Thus, many young Burmese are simply whiling away time at home, or getting into any income- generating profession they can think of.

Burma’s ruling junta, called the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), ordered all institutions of higher learning shut down in December 1996, following widespread student protests against alleged police atrocities against their colleagues in the capital Rangoon.

Though the protests were peaceful and directed against specific police officials, the Burmese regime considered the students’ actions a “political movement” and accused opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy of instigating them.

The December protests marked the first time since 1991 that students had taken to the streets, an event that unnerved the junta.

Students, after all, had played a key role in the 1988 pro- democracy movement that toppled Burma’s ruler at the time – General Ne Win. In those protests, thousands of students were arrested or forced into exile by the SLORC government that replaced Ne Win’s regime.

“After making Burma a nation of paupers, the military wants to make its citizens illiterate also,” says Min Kyaw, a final-year graduate student at the Rangoon Institute of Technology.

Students at the his institute were at the forefront of the student agitation last year, which occurred after some of their colleagues were badly beaten up by policemen who had intervened in a dispute between them and some local shopkeepers.

Since 1988 schools, colleges and universities have been shut, often forcing students to spend several more years than usual to complete graduate courses in engineering, medicine and other disciplines.

In the latest round of closures, the only institution left untouched — much to the annoyance of many students — is the Army Institute of Technology (AIT). Started two years ago with state funds, the institute caters largely to the children of military officers or those vouched for by top military officials.

“For quite some time now, SLORC authorities have been worried about their own children getting involved in anti-government political movements and the AIT was meant to solve that problem by providing education for a privileged group of students safely isolated from children of civilian families,” says a political analyst in Rangoon.

He points out that the army institute has become a symbol of the military’s complete isolation from the citizens it is meant to and claims to protect.

In its paranoia about Burma’s students becoming politically active again, SLORC officials have tried to “depoliticise” campuses. Apart from opening institutions like the AIT they have also, in recent years, opened more universities and colleges in the provinces to disperse the student population into more “manageable units” and deny them a chance to come together.

Also to prevent students from organising themselves, the government in 1995 upgraded the former department of correspondence education to the status of a university. For many students only interested in obtaining degrees, doing courses through correspondence has become an attractive proposition.

But as a pro-democracy student activist points out, education by correspondence only ends up distancing the students from education, which is not only about reading books but also interacting with others and learning to discuss and debate.

The worsening economic situation in Burma, which may fuel further unrest, is another reason for authorities’ hesitance to reopen universities. After the initial rush, foreign investment flowing into the country is tapering off. And with the almost complete failure of the much-touted Visit Myanmar Year launched in November 1996, jobs have become extremely scarce.

In Rangoon today, it is common to see people with degrees in medicine and engineering selling consumer goods in streetside shops, and students of English literature serving beer to tourists. The city’s taxi drivers regularly prove to be far more qualified than the passengers they carry around town.

Prior to their closure, Burma’s more than 45 universities and colleges churned out 25,000 graduates last year alone – and nearly 2,000 of them were engineering and medical professionals.

The government sector, which till recently was the only avenue for employment in the country, is too small to handle so many qualified personnel and is already overstaffed. Government jobs pay poorly, with the highest salaries not crossing 3,000 kyat per month or 12 U.S. dollars.

“Leave alone business opportunities that are anyway being cornered by the relatives of top army officials. Even ordinary jobs are impossible to get without proper contacts,” says a student who after doing a master’s degree in literature now runs a small streetside restaurant.

Given the absolute control the army wields in Burma, many young students are finding joining the defence forces an increasingly attractive option. Those who do not come from army families, however, are discriminated against by officials worried about ‘infiltration’ of their ranks by student ‘subversives’.

For many qualified Burmese, escaping to greener pastures abroad remains a persistent dream but obtaining passports, visas and gaining entry to other countries is difficult, due to government restrictions, and also an extremely costly process.

Because passports and visas usually given only to a select few, the most popular route of migration is with the help of travel agents who arrange both necessary documents and jobs abroad for a fee. Such a ‘package deal’ can cost from around 2,000 dollars for neighbouring Thailand, to as high as 15,000 dollars for more popular desinations like Korea and Japan.

Despite all the problems that the educated face in Burma, most families still put priority on educating their children. This is due not only to the long tradition of respect for the educated in Burmese society, but to the security that possessing a university degree provides. The deterioration of the education system, however, has taken its toll.

‘Unfortunately, the standards of education have gone down so much in recent decades that the degrees given are not an indication of real learning,” laments a Rangoon university professor.

He says much of the curricula used in Burmese universities still date back to the British colonial era, and the military regime’s closed-door policies have cut off the country’s educators from the rest of the world.

The only recourse left to students who cannot go abroad to pursue their studies is to depend on the numerous private teaching institutions that have sprung up in major cities like Rangoon and Mandalay.

Offering courses in English, computer programming, management and tourism, these informal colleges, some set up by investors from Singapore, often charge unaffordable fees.

“If we send our children to state-run universities, we are afraid of losing them to the political whims of the government. If we send them to private courses, we stand to lose all our savings,” says a middle-level government employee, whose two college-level sons are at home waiting for colleges to reopen.