“Education is expensive, but ignorance costs even more!”
A Chinese proverb says: If you plan for a year, plant rice; if you plan for 10 years, plant trees; if you plan for 100 years, educate people. In the last three decades, we first secured food (rice), and in recent years we’ve planted palm trees and other trees. Yet Albanians are fleeing just as they did when they had neither food nor trees. So now I believe the time has come to focus intensely on educating our people.
What is happening in the world today? The world is dominated by giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook. They collect, process, analyze and use our data, thoughts, tastes, and preferences—the most strategic product of the century, the “oil” of the 21st century, the product of people’s minds. All of us, even from Albania, “work” contentedly for these companies with every click we make, every search we perform, and we aren’t even paid for it. Meanwhile, predictions we hear every year at Davos, at the World Economic Forum, tell us that in 10 years, by 2030, perhaps 80% of the professions we know will no longer exist. Oops! Where are we in the face of this future that is unfolding at breakneck speed?
In fact, we don’t have drinkable water inside our homes, so we’re forced to buy it bottled, and we have some of the most expensive and lowest quality fuel in Europe. Births have fallen from 82,000 in 1991 to 28,934 in 2018. Unemployment is high, especially among youth, while inflation remains low—there’s no one to drive it up, neither spending nor investment. Albanians’ economic decision-making mostly revolves around planning how to leave the country. We have the worst ranking in every development index, competitiveness, business environment, poverty, access to infrastructure, ICT, and economic productivity. Investment in Education doesn’t exceed 2.9% of GDP while spending on scientific research and development is just 0.001% of GDP—again, last in the region. In short, we have a weak economy, incapable of creating perspective or development. How can we change this?
To achieve economic development, we need to increase productivity. There are two ways to do this: increase the productivity of physical and technological capital, or increase the productivity of human capital.
We will always buy physical and technological capital. And it will almost always cost us an arm and a leg. We cannot bridge the development gap we have, especially the physical one, no matter what we do. To take an example of this gap: while we barely manage to pave a few kilometers of road a year with asphalt, France has started paving roads with solar panels. Attempts to fill the physical gap have a more electoral than developmental character, especially due to the political fragmentation of expenditures—a road here, an alley there, some tiles in this square, a tree or a palm over there, etc. I repeat, we as a country cannot fill the development gap to cross to the other side. As an EBRD report on the convergence of the Western Balkans with the EU average standard of living states, from today it will take Albania 60 to 220 years to reach the EU average.
The only possibility left to us is to increase the productivity of human capital. We cannot ignore, on the contrary, we must become aware of what is happening in the world today. It only takes one idea to produce wealth, employment, and development. The most important wealth today is the mind. Data. Using it as efficiently and strategically as possible in production sectors is where we need to focus our attention. This is our chance. We have only one opportunity to cross the development gap. We can’t fill it, but we can leap over it! This opportunity is investment in Education, in education for the digital age, starting from preschool. Above all, we need to learn and train continuously, at any age, to be able to use information and communication technology properly, so that it becomes the right tool for economic and human development in our country.
Studies conducted in Albania by UNICEF show that investment in our education sector, especially in preschool, as it is—without reforming it—has a rate of return of 12.8%; international studies show that these rates of return in education can reach levels of up to 36%, or affect GDP growth by 1 percentage point.
At the end of January 2019, the World Economic Forum was held in Davos. The patron of this forum, Klaus Schwab, said in his opening: “The 4th Industrial Revolution is transforming the world, economic systems in many ways. The physical world is being shrunk by a new digital world, interconnected, integrated and virtual, with a shared economy. Manufacturing is being revolutionized by automation, localization and individualism—which weakens traditional supply chains. Competition is increasingly based not on production costs but on functionality and innovation. Very soon economies of scale will no longer provide the advantages they do today. The most precious resource (for development) will be talent, not traditional capital.”
This talent doesn’t grow in the forest. This talent is nourished at home and trained in school. Therefore, the strategic national priority for development must be Education—the concrete examples of Israel, Singapore, etc., should not be ignored by our politicians, who find it easier to wallow in empty, soap opera-like discussions. No one can hide behind the excuse that we can’t increase spending on education because we have other troubles. Everything is needed, but more than anything else, we need capable people of the 21st century, not just people with slightly fewer troubles.
These voices need to be reminded without delay of a saying attributed to many, but which is a truth proven over centuries: “Education is expensive, but ignorance is even more expensive”. The price of ignorance that we pay is the emptying of Albania, every day. Any budgetary sacrifice that prioritizes spending from other sectors towards Education, more than a sacrifice, is wisdom, national vision—which precisely fulfills the prophecy of our anthem: united around the flag, with one desire and one purpose!
This means a fundamental reform of our 19th century Education system, from teaching methods, training and radical renewal of the teaching body, their annual certification, curricula, technology used, etc. This Education system we have pushes our future away, even more than our enemies might wish to do.
In tomorrow’s Education sector, 21st century skills must be taught, such as critical thinking, digital knowledge, coding, programming. The student doesn’t need to memorize or artificially excel in tests; in the new education system, one must learn how to learn, how to communicate and collaborate, and increase individual and social capacities to adapt to the exponential speed of change that is happening relentlessly around us. By transforming the Education sector into the engine of productivity for all other sectors—agriculture, tourism, manufacturing, industry.
Many may find countless excuses not to invest fully in educating Albanians, especially politicians thus far. To these, I say: stop the poor excuses. If we don’t prioritize education very soon, we risk becoming culturally stagnant in our lifetime, like living relics of the past, like alive mummies, like the Cro-Magnon People of the 21st century. Tourists might then visit Albania not to experience a vibrant, modern culture, but to observe a society frozen in time.
Dritan Shano
29.12.2019
