Educational Reforms and Politics

First published in The Island on Friday 7, December 2007

There is talk about a new Education Act being introduced soon. Education reforms are not new to us. Significant changes have been made in the field of education in this country many times before, especially over the past seventy-five years. The 1931 grant of universal franchise led to reforms in many spheres that focused more attention than ever before on the welfare of the dispossessed majority of the indigenous population. These included reforms in the education field. The Free Education Act of 1944, the change of the medium of instruction in 1945, the takeover of private schools in 1961, and the various revisions introduced in the education system by successive governments both UNP-led and SLFP-led including the 1997 General Education Reforms were all sincere, well-meaning attempts at improving general education, implemented with varying degrees of success.

Broadly speaking, however, the history of educational reforms has not been one of steady progress, although some progress has definitely been achieved. The earlier initiatives such as the introduction of free education, the restoration of the native tongues as the mediums of instruction, and the takeover of private schools generally succeeded in achieving the expected results. These innovations maximized the participation of suburban and rural children in national schooling, and at least partly guaranteed some equality of opportunity for them in accessing education, which made it possible for many talented young men and women from hitherto neglected sections of the population to gain admission to the university in order to qualify for prestigious positions in the country. This enabled them to make a positive contribution to national development. Thus a fairly high level of success was witnessed during the first two decades following independence. Since about the early 1970’s a general slackening of the momentum of forward movement has been in evidence, with a widespread decline in the quality of education, student unrest, crises in school management, and a host of other ills. Some of these, no doubt, have been, paradoxically, concomitant with the rapid expansion of the availability of educational opportunity, and the government’s relative failure or ill-preparedness to accommodate large numbers of students with its insufficient resources.

Various governments, however, have made genuine attempts to fix these and other problems as best they could. In spite of this many problems still remain. Hence the perceived need for a new education act. In any case, reforms are the rule rather the exception in a fast changing society like ours.

In my opinion the relative failure or the imperfect success of educational reforms, especially over the last nearly four decades can be generally attributed to two major factors: the failure, on the part of legislators, to arrive at any consensual agreement about policies in the interest of the nation rather than that of their individual political parties, the result of which is a general lack of commitment to the continued pursuit of reforms enacted by one government when it is replaced by another (however, I will qualify this statement later); and the various drawbacks at the implementation level such as the poor quality of instructional materials, the lack of physical resources, inadequate training and motivation among teachers, absence of meaningful and supportive supervision of personnel, and so on.

Before going on further I would like to state a truism relevant to our subject: Not all problems affecting the youth of the country (in whom we are specifically interested when we talk about education) – the majority of them are receiving education in schools or in centres of higher learning - cannot be blamed exclusively on the shortcomings of the education system. Certain issues in education itself may be due to extraneous causes such as the poor economic performance of the country, political unrest, armed rebellion, natural disasters, etc. The education system of any country has no independent existence; it is inextricably bound with the general fortunes of the country as a whole. The rampant student unrest in our universities is partly due to frustration born out of fear and uncertainty about the future, and also to political opportunism which exploits such situations.

The general failure of many well-thought out, well-meaning development programmes , including those relating to education, in this country is due mainly to partisan politics and poor management. There are other negative factors that bear on the fate of well laid- out plans, but these two are the most important.

There is a tendency among the majority of our country’s political leaders to sacrifice national interest for the sake of their own personal political gain. We, the masses, elect our representatives expecting them to make our life better by exercising on our behalf our inalienable right to govern ourselves. We don’t send them to Parliament in order that they divide themselves into two rival teams called the government and the opposition and do nothing but scuttle the ship of state. Yet this is what usually happens.

The opposition seems to believe that it is their bounden duty to bring down the government by any means possible, not caring whether the government is doing right or wrong. But something that they have intentionally or unintentionally forgotten is that the majority of the common people of this country are literate thanks to free education, and are not so naïve as to fall for their mean stratagems all the time.

Unfortunately for us everything including what we eat is being politicized by self-seeking politicos; even food should not be accepted for its own sake unless it is grown locally or imported from abroad marked with a particular party label. What I mean by this hypothetical absurdity is that our politicians fail to reach a consensus when they ought to do so particularly in matters of vital national interest such as education, health, and public security.

The calamitous national malaise of mean politics which prevents wholehearted agreement on common people-friendly policies, whoever their progenitors, even when they subscribe to identical political views (such as those shared by the two main parties, the UNP and the SLFP) is one of the principal causes that have aborted a number of sound projects launched by different governments in the interest of public good.

In the decades immediately after independence the present level of mindless politicalization had not yet infected the Sri Lankan body politic. Therefore the changes introduced during what the late Mr Bandaranaike called the period of ‘transition’ (The country had only recently emerged from foreign domination then and was charting her own independent course) came to fruition without being foiled by political opportunists.

This problem of Sri Lanka’s own children fighting among themselves over her prostrate body in the name of resuscitating and defending her has not been totally ignored by all politicians. Some of them have even tried to do something about it. The circumstances of the 1997 educational reforms provide a good example. Work on these reforms started in 1991 under a UNP government, and came to a conclusion in 1997 during a PA government. Following is an extract from the introduction to the 1997 reforms:

Realizing the importance of pursuing a settled policy for Education which should

remain outside the ambit of day to day politics, a National Education Commission

was established in 1991. The mandate of the Commission was to advise the Government

on overall policy covering all aspects of Education in the country.

(General Education Reforms 1997 p.4)

True to the spirit of this statement the new administration under President Chandrika Bandaranaike accepted the documents produced by the first Commission, which she re-constituted at the expiry of its term. The new government also began the implementation of the recommended policies, as the introduction referred to above points out.

So the 1997 Educational Reforms, at least initially, enjoyed the best chance of success. Yet here too success has been partial. In this case the second factor I mentioned at the beginning seems to take a greater proportion of responsibility than the first (the ‘malaise’ I have dealt with above) for the reforms falling short of the target: namely failure in carrying through the reforms at the most vital school level, and this is not totally unrelated to the first.

The improvements proposed were very ambitious; the zeal of the reformers was unquestionable too. But whether they succeeded in inspiring the same level of motivation and commitment among the personnel responsible for implementing the programmes is a moot point. My feeling is that more attention should be paid by the architects of the new act to this aspect: the need to ensure the quality of instructional resources – textbooks, teachers, supportive materials, their equitable distribution across the country, etc -, the strict supervision and evaluation of the whole process, and its constant enrichment in response to the changing needs and conditions of the target population, i.e., the youth of our country.

On the whole however, the 1997 reforms have not been a total failure. In some respects constructive measures have been implemented successfully to remedy certain chronic shortcomings of the education system.

For example, a longstanding criticism of our schooling system is that there is a mismatch between the courses offered by our institutions of higher learning and the real needs of the society with the result that the young people who pass through this system are unemployable because they don’t possess the expertise that they require to perform in the jobs on offer outside. It was a senior Sri Lankan university don who commented, ‘The university has departments, the society has problems’. The 1997 reforms made an attempt to address this problem among others.

By a welcome coincidence, when I was halfway through this essay, I found the text of the speech by Minister of Higher Education Professor Wiswa Warnapala at the convocation of the SLIATE on 23^rd November at the BMICH reproduced in The Island (Tuesday 4^th December, 2007). He served as a member of the ‘Presidential Task Force on General Education 1997’ in his capacity as the then Deputy Minister of Education and Higher Education.

The establishment of the SLIATE during President Chandrika Bandaranaike’s first term of office (1994-2000) was a result of these reforms. Today as a premiere institute of technological education in Sri Lanka it turns out trained young men and women who stand a good chance of gainful employment both here and abroad as Professor Warnapala proudly points out in his speech.

He also reiterates the eminently supportable opinion that the mere development and transmission of academic knowledge is not enough; the new technological changes demand new types of human resources, i.e., new practical skills. (This is a confirmation of the argument in my previous contribution to this paper under the title ‘Language, Education, and Civilization’ Midweek Review, Wednesday 5^th that education is a combination of knowledge and practical skills, to put it roughly. In other words, education means both ‘academic’ knowledge comprising all the conceptual experiences of humanity such as science, art, engineering, and so on, plus practical skills based on the physical application of such knowledge for the benefit of all.)

It is hoped that the authors of the latest educational changes will maintain the 1997 momentum of initiating an apolitical approach to nation-friendly policy improvement and implementation so that we can put an end the cannibalistic practice of politicizing national issues and the curse of perfunctory plan implementation without any patriotic feeling.

Rohana R. Wasala