Can Caribbean Education Attract Knowledge-Based Foreign Direct Investment?
Institutionalists have long recognized the importance of education to a country's development. Thorstein Veblen argued that the immaterial equipment of a nation might be the most significant category of its assets and that its embodiment in workers makes a nation's tangible assets useful.1 The immaterial equipment expands through education, which increases the nation's "common stock of intangible, technological equipment," and the history of the growth and use of this stock constitutes "the history of the development of material civilization" ([1919] 1990, 328). Clarence Ayres ([1944] 1962, xxi) said "the most important factor in the economic life of any people is the educational level ... of the community." And in his monumental study of Asia, Gunnar Myrdal (1972, 378) wrote, "[E]ducational policy must have the central purpose of directing and apportioning educational efforts so as to give a maximum impetus to national development." Institutionalists have also recognized that the content and function of education change as society evolves. Veblen said that "the knowledge acquired under the priestly teachers of the primitive community was a knowledge of ritual and ceremonial.... What was learned was how to make oneself indispensable to the powers [preternatural agents], and so to put oneself in a position to ask, or even to require, their intercession in the course of events or their abstention from interference in any given enterprise" ([18991 1953, 236). This is the knowledge of those "whose habits of thought are not shaped by contact with modern industry" (237). As society develops, however, exoteric knowledge, "comprising chiefly knowledge of industrial processes and of natural phenomena which [are] habitually turned to account for the material purposes of life," assumes greater importance.