English in General Education - A Historical Perspective

English in General Education - A Historical Perspective
(First published: The Island/1st October 2010)
For well over two hundred years now English has been playing a predominant role, in one form or another, in all spheres of national activity in our country such as civil administration, justice, business, industry, and education. During most of this period, the majority of the population had reason to believe that it was a weapon wielded against them by a foreign power bent on subverting them spiritually as well as temporally. But today, they are witnessing an apparent sea change in their attitude towards English. They are courting it as an agent of modernization and development, at some cost though.


The history of the present form of formal education in our country opens with the establishment of a rudimentary school system by the British in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rev. Cordiner arrived in Sri Lanka (then known among foreigners as “Ceylon”) in 1799 to serve as chaplain of the British garrison in Colombo. Later on, he became the principal of all the schools in the settlement. The Christian institutions created by Governor Edward Barnes (1824-1831) in 1827 were intended to train suitable young natives for “communicating a knowledge of Christianity to their countrymen”. Obviously, the cultural subversion of a predominantly non-Christian population was one of the foremost aims of the colonisers. Protestant schools established in the island numbered well over two hundred. Christian schools and colleges dominated formal education until 1886. The English medium education provided in these institutions also aimed at turning out the personnel necessary from among the local youth to work in subordinate positions in the government and business enterprises owned by foreigners. These schools catered to the elite which mainly comprised the Westernized English speaking Christians of all communities. There was also a system of primary vernacular schools meant for children from the downtrodden classes who formed the majority. But vernacular education did not qualify them for a position above the level of a school teacher or a notary public. These young people were deliberately debarred from access to the superior education that was available only in the English schools: the English schools, which were highly subsidized by the government and could offer free tuition, charged fees in order to make them too expensive for the majority of the country’s young to attend. Secondary and collegiate education in English cost the government Rs 84 and Rs 214 per student per annum respectively, whereas the corresponding figure for a child in a vernacular school was Rs 14-16.

This discriminatory treatment of the subject population created a relatively contented, privileged, English speaking, elitist, Christian minority and a hostile, dispossessed, discontented, native language speaking, mainly Buddhist, and Hindu majority. Both groups were ethnically diverse. But while their common language and religion, and the comprador status united the privileged minority, there was nothing for the dispossessed majority to share in harmony than their wretchedness under the foreign yoke.

The Sinhalese Buddhist revivalist movement led by patriotic nationalists like Anagarika Dharmapala attracted the attention of theosophist Colonel Henry Steel Olcott from America who arrived in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in 1880. Colonel Olcott, together with local leaders, pioneered the establishment of Buddhist schools such as Ananda College in Colombo and Dharmaraja College in Kandy. These were English medium schools.

The grant of universal franchise in 1931 accelerated reforms in many areas. In that year, English schools which alone provided secondary and collegiate education had on roll 84,000 students; this contrasted with 476,000 students in primary vernacular schools. Dr C.W.W. Kannangara, as Minister of Education (1931-47) in the State Council, introduced far-reaching reforms that benefited all classes, particularly the previously neglected rural children. It was during his tenure that the Central College system was inaugurated which made an English medium education available free of charge to the village students; the University of Peradeniya was also established in the same period. But the most outstanding achievement of his which he is remembered by was the Free Education Scheme (1944). He managed to see the Free Education Act through the State Council in the teeth of opposition from the elite. The replacement of English with native languages as the medium of instruction was effected in 1945.

Changes brought about in 1956 and after were aimed at restoring justice to the common people who had long been denied it both under the Europeans and, following their departure, under the local ruling class dominated by the Westernized English speaking elite. The takeover of private schools (1961) was another significant move in the same direction. Those who pioneered the policy changes of 1944, 1945 and 1961 were nevertheless mindful of the importance of the English language for education, and did everything possible to promote the teaching of it as a second language. However, the next two decades did not see the expected level of acceptance and mastery of English among the general mass of students as a tool of enhancing their education that they now received in their own mother tongue as their right.

Various well-meaning educational reforms have been introduced particularly since 1970 to date by successive regimes resulting in some moderate improvement in the critical areas focused, such as the lessening of the traditional mismatch between the education provided and the society’s actual needs (“The university has departments; the society has problems” as an eminent academic once put it), improved prospects of bridging the perennial urban-rural gap, increased focus on the employability of the youth, etc. In the meantime, the normally poor knowledge of English one sees among the majority of our students has been identified by most as a central defect responsible for the less than satisfactory performance of our education system, and this has ramifications for all other issues.

A stock reaction to this situation is to question the wisdom of the language planners, and policy-makers of the past who substituted Sinhala and Tamil for English as the medium of instruction. Those who thus criticise the Kannangaras and the Bandaranaikes either ignore or are ignorant of the fact that the high level of English knowledge from which an inexcusable decline is alleged to have occurred was not a universal phenomenon. In fact, the high level of English language proficiency was rather the exception than the rule in the context of the new free education system that was suddenly expanded to include every social stratum without discrimination between the rich and the poor. Earlier English medium education used to be the exclusive preserve of a privileged few. When education was made free, it was obviously not possible to make it available to all the children of the country in the English medium because English had been used until then by an infinitesimal minority among the population. According to the census of 1946, after nearly one hundred and fifty years of government sponsored English education (restricted as it was to a minority), only about 6% of the total population had even a very elementary knowledge of the language.

We shouldn’t forget that since the 1944 reforms English as a second language has been an important component of the school curriculum for all the children of the island irrespective of their social background. For the vast majority of our population any serious contact with English in educational terms should be considered as originating there. So, when some people talk about the excellent standards of English that obtained before the introduction of swabhasha education, and blame its decline on an allegedly misguided insistence on the necessity of teaching in the mother tongue by the nationalists, they are making it appear as if English had been available to all and sundry prior to those reforms. Plainly, where general English language proficiency was concerned, there never was a paradise for the poor devils to lose.

In keeping with the best informed expert opinion and the democratically most acceptable choice of the time, English was replaced with the mother tongue of the child as the medium of instruction. In the Central Schools, which originally offered English medium instruction to the generality of rural students, the switchover to the mother tongue was complete by the beginning of the 1960’s. Although official attention to the teaching of English was never relaxed the period 1960-80 saw a steady waning of enthusiasm about acquiring a knowledge of English among school children and even among students in higher education (as already pointed out) because they found or rather believed that an education received in the mother tongue was adequate for their purposes. No doubt, this attitude was shared among many ordinary people.

That was a brief two decades in which, at least some of us Sri Lankans, perhaps the majority, felt almost completely free from the baleful influence that English exercised on our lives as the language of imperial occupation during the two hundred years of our association with it. The natural aversion to English meant that the majority of the population, unconsciously perhaps, rejected it when it was offered as a second language; even those who would have hankered after it as a means of gaining power, prestige, and position in the days of British rule now found it a spent force. Such nationalistic antipathy towards English (which, until recently, was only to be expected) was among the factors accountable for the general failure of the state English teaching programme.

This was contrary to what the pioneering educational reformers, language planners, and policy-making politicians intended. They clearly understood that English was indispensable for Sri Lanka to forge ahead educationally and economically, and did everything necessary to promote its learning by the youth of the country; they expected the changed role of English as the key to modernization to be appreciated by the populace in a context where the indigenous languages were restored to their due status. However, these expectations seem to have been broadly frustrated. English, after all, might not have shed its kaduwa associations in the perception of ordinary people. Or perhaps, they’ve believed to date that they could survive without English.

The introduction of the free market economic policies in 1978 proved a politico-economic watershed with far-reaching consequences for the country both internally and externally. The changes brought it more in line with the idea of globalism – prioritising the so-called ‘interests of the whole world’ over those of individual countries or nations. (The term ‘global village’ is already over forty years old, although the concept itself obviously predated it.) Internally, the state of majority vis-à-vis minority politics became more unsettled than before, creating an exposed flank for biased internationalist manipulation against the country. In this context, English has assumed increased significance for us, internationally, as the lingua franca of global communication, and inside the country, as an ethnically neutral medium especially in the education domain and in the job market. At the same time, English is the obvious key to the utilisation of the modern information and communications technologies that are fast advancing. Above all, English is being recognized as the indispensable medium of advanced education particularly in the scientific and technological fields.

English is thus making a resurgence in a fundamentally different role. It is seen as a tool ready to hand rather than feared as a ‘kaduwa’ (sword) to buckle under. During colonial times, English was an instrument of foreign domination and exploitation, except for those who gained from it at the expense of the rights of the majority. Today, “Learn English” is the mantra of modernization which is popular even in the remotest districts of the island; it is more acceptable to the general public than ever. Everybody seems happy. The return of English enjoys the vital political support and official backing it needs.

However, there’s a real challenge before us: that of devising ways and means to forestall the re-emergence or perpetuation of such problems as the denial of equality of educational opportunity to significant sections of the population, failure to create a level playing field for job-seekers from disadvantaged backgrounds, and potential threats to the survival of our cultural identities embodied in our own ancient languages and literatures, etc. which may result from the re-introduction of English as the dominant medium of education. These are the very problems that earlier generations tried to overcome by introducing educational reforms that included the determination of the relative value of English in the scheme of things.