A star in love

The poet saw

Beauty

The sculptor carved her Image

They named her Venus

We call her Madhubala

- Advertisement for Sharabi (1964), the last of Madhubala’s films to be released in her lifetime, quoted by Khatija Akbar in her book about the late actress

Madhubala (14 February 1933-23 February 1969), was “… the most beautiful of all the heroines in the fairyland of films, with her natural looks, always as fresh as morning dew, sans heavy make-up, false eyelashes, contact lenses or scanty dresses fashioned by designers to impart artificial glamour that would titillate male curiosity…” in the words of the late Dev Anand, Indian cinema’s ‘ever green’ hero in his autobiography ‘Romancing with Life’. She is still hailed as the most ravishing beauty ever to have graced Indian cinema. Born into a conservative Pathan Muslim family in Delhi she was named Mumtaz Jehan Begum Dehlavi at birth. ‘Madhubala’ was the screen name given her by the film industry. Her birth on St. Valentine’s day is often remarked on by those who cherish her memory as symbolic of her life both on screen and in the real world because her ‘heart’ played an abnormally decisive role in it. Khatija Akbar, in her biography of the star ‘I Want to Live’-The Story of Madhubala, (the main source for this article) writes: “Her very birth - on St. Valentine’s day, with a congenital heart disease – lends a mystical touch to the image of a woman who was always a victim of her heart”.

As a versatile actor she was the leading lady in most of the seventy-two films she starred in (in sixty-six of them in fact), some of them based on romances that see no happy ending like Mughal-e-Azam, some celebrating dreamland love sagas where the lovers finally make it after overcoming all obstacles like Barsaat-ki-Raat, and some committed to hilarious comedy like Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi; it seems that in her off-screen life, however, her moments of happiness were far less frequent than those of unhappiness, for she was dogged by ill health all her life, and her real life romance with legendary actor Dilip Kumar (Yusuf Khan) ended in heartbreak coupled with unwarranted ignominy. She was suffering from a heart disorder known as a ‘hole in the heart’ (ventricular septal defect) for which there was no known medical remedy then; her trips to Russia and England in this connection were in vain. Her marriage to eccentric singer actor Kishore Kumar subsequent to her estrangement with Dilip Kumar was a loveless one and a source of much suffering for her. Commenting on her own life, she revealed to a Filmfare journalist assigned to do a feature on her (as quoted by Khatija Akbar):

The sum total of my life is bitter experience which is coiled tight like a spring within my heart and when released hurts excruciatingly. It is true that one learns something from every experience but when the experience is evil, the shock is so great that one feels as though one can never recover from it. I am very emotional. I have always lived my life with my heart. For that I have suffered more than is necessary. I have been hurt.

Nevertheless, the Madhubala-Dilip Kumar affair, though carried on discreetly, out of the limelight, without disturbing too much the actress’s conservative, extremely strict disciplinarian father Ataullah Khan who always made sure that he himself or one or two of her sisters chaperoned her into and out of the studios, was in itself a fascinating story of love. Reminiscing about the affair between Madhubala and Dilip Kumar, Madhur Bhushan, Madhubala’s youngest sister born in 1950 says: “They were made for each other”. But the affair came to an acrimonious end in 1956-7. There was apparently no important reason for the breakup other than, perhaps, that the three characters involved – Dilip, Madhubala, and her father – were Pathans, who, in popular tradition, are credited with an unbending nature.

Strangely, this most famous star couple of the Indian silver screen co-starred in only four films (out of the seventy-two Madhubala acted in): Tarana (1951), Sangdil (1952), Amar (1954), and Mughal-e-Azam (1960).The first has a happy ending while the other three end in different forms of tragedy. The making of the last film took almost ten years. The four movies together, in effect, span the whole of the period of her adult acting career except for Mahal (1949). The inexorable movement from exquisite happiness to abject misery depicted in the dreamworld of cinema through these four films parallels a similar succession of events in her personal life dominated by her romantic relationship with Dilip Kumar. Mahal, which she did at just sixteen with thirty-eight year old veteran actor Ashok Kumar made her a star overnight, but the later Tarana (she did sixteen other films as heroine between Mahal and Tarana) marked the beginning of her masterful portrayal of a love-struck heroine. In the latter movie Madhubala, who was eighteen, was cast against Dilip Kumar, full ten years her senior in age. However, in their affair, it was Madhubala who took the initiative. While on the sets of Tarana she sent her hair-dresser with a rose for Dilip Kumar telling the woman to ask him to accept the flower only if he loved her. Dilip Kumar, amused by such a gesture from his young co-star, accepted the rose as if in play.

It was the case that young Madhubala used to play occasional pranks on her work colleagues. But she was not playing this time; she was actually falling in love with the man. A vivacious young woman who got on well with her fellow artistes she was a bit of a flirt, but her flirtation was meant as innocent fun. She was just a child among her senior colleagues, except Dilip Kumar. Out of the studios, Ashok Kumar said, he always treated her as a ‘kid’. Initially, Madhubala showed some interest in Premnath, but her real love was for Dilip Kumar alone. From her Tarana days up to her death, she loved no man but Dilip Kumar, according to Kaneez Fatima, another of Madhubala’s sisters.

In Tarana, a plane, in which a doctor returning to India after studies in England is travelling, crash-lands in a remote rural area. The doctor (Moti, played by Dilip Kumar) finds shelter in the house of a villager, a blind widower who lives alone with his beautiful young daughter (Tarana, played by Madhubala), who was an unsophisticated but uninhibited village beauty. A discrete affair starts between Moti and Tarana. Moti is able to restore the old man’s sight through surgery. A clandestine meeting between the two lovers unexpectedly leads to a misunderstanding and Moti is beaten up and left for dead. He is found by his family and taken back home. Later, however, after the usual denouement in such a story, he comes back and claims his love. It is a simple love story without any serious message. Madhubala was still establishing her reputation as a talented actor whose performance was natural without a trace of overacting. The experience of actually falling in love with her hero probably made her kind of natural acting even more realistic.

Sangdil tells a different type of story. It is a rough adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel Jane Eyre. Shankar and Kamla (in the film Dilip Kumar and Madhubala respectively) are childhood lovers who get separated and reunite later as young adults in different circumstances, Kamla as a pujaaran (priestess) and Shankar as a thakur. But when they finally meet for a permanent union,Shankar is blind, having lost his sight in a fire, and Kamla becomes his partner. Her role in the film represented the ideal Indian woman of the time, demure, modest and dutiful, which in her own life, in a way, interfered with her ability to maintain a sufficiently independent relationship with Dilip Kumar. Madhubala had a natural love of acting, singing and dancing. She started her career as a child actor at age nine in 1942 in Basant which became an immediate hit. Her headstrong, hot- tempered father having lost his job in the Imperial Tobacco Company in Delhi had to daily accompany his daughter to the studio instead of finding work for himself. Very soon the little girl assumed the role of the main breadwinner of her large family including her five sisters and father and mother. The conservative disciplinarian Ataullah Khan strictly regulated her career and life. He objected to her affair with Yusuf (Dilip Kumar), and ultimately contributed to their final parting of ways. Madhubala was devoted to her father and family. Her refusal to give up seeing her father any longer as Dilip demanded as a condition of marriage was largely instrumental in putting an end to their relationship. The late Shammi Kapoor who knew Madhubala and her circumstances well, and was fond of her as a friend, also believed that she had to leave her family some day; her not doing so had tragic consequences. But perhaps she was only playing the role of the normal Indian woman.

As she became older and more experienced she understood the value of a more self-assertive and independent attitude as a woman. In a Filmfare feature years later Madhubala said: “As times change, values also appear to alter. Hugging the old values to my heart and unable to adapt myself to people and conditions around me, I have given cause for resentment to many and I myself have experienced much pain.” Amar, which critics thought was clearly ahead of its times in terms of its central theme, gave Madhubala a chance to portray the most complicated role of a mature woman in love that she had had to handle up to that point in her career. Here she is caught up in a tripartite relationship that eventually leads her to a painful sacrifice. Amarnath (Dilip Kumar) is a successful, highly regarded advocate who is involved in an affair with an educated, socially conscious young woman called Anju (Madhubala) who lives with her father in a palatial house. Sonia (Nimmi) is a poor young village girl, a milkmaid, whom Amarnath rapes, succumbing to a momentary impulse. The girl gets pregnant and the disgraced family wants to kill her. When at the end Amarnath confesses to having molested the milkmaid, and accepts responsibility for the crime, Anju leaves her penitent lover allowing him to marry in recompense the woman he had wronged.

In real life, however, when her relationship with Dilip Kumar broke up, Madhubala found it difficult to deal with the devastating frustration she experienced with the same sense of equanimity and courage she portrayed in that film. Khatija Akbar writes: “While Dilip Kumar appeared to emerge relatively unscathed, for Madhubala it was the beginning of the end; the festering wounds she carried never healed. Emotional to a fault, guileless in the bargain, she was not equipped to deal with the shock of the break-up.”

It was in Mughal-e-Azam, her magnum opus, that her screen life almost totally overlapped her real life experience of her romantic entanglement with Dilip Kumar. The film was done after the rift between them. They fulfilled their contract on the film as estranged former lovers. Like Anarkali in the film she found herself stranded between two strong-willed men. The legend of Anarkali is probably not history, but fiction. However, it is good material for creative treatment. It had already been the subject of a number of films by the time director K. Asif decided to make yet another film on it. Prince Salim, son of Akbar the Great, who later succeeded his father as Jahangir Khan, falls in love with the most beautiful dancing girl in the imperial court. Naturally , the Emperor opposes the young prince’s affair with a slave girl. As a result the young man even goes to war against his father. Later, Akbar defeats him in battle and passes the death sentence on him for rebellion. Anarkali, hearing this, emerges from hiding and offers herself for punishment in order to save the prince. Salim is saved, and Anarkali is sentenced to be walled to death (but in this film, Akbar secretly lets her go away to live in another territory). Commentators have said that Madhubala, while playing Anarkali, was living her own real life on the screen. Her superb performance has been unanimously praised by the viewers. In one scene Prince Salim is required to give Anarkali a slap on the cheek. Dilip Kumar delivered this slap with more force than necessary as if in real anger. Madhubala left the set in a huff. The director tried to pacify her saying “This shows that he still loves you”. When Madhubala participated in the memorable love scenes in Mughal-e-Azam with Dilip Kumar, she was not in speaking terms with him, following the breakup. The excellence of her performance, despite apparent lack of personal warmth towards her co-star, is testimony to her professionalism.

Madhubala’s inimitable realism and Dilip Kumar’s passionate intensity in the movies they did together were, no doubt, partly due to their real life experience as lovers. It is as if their private interactions which they tried to keep under wraps from public gaze were played out on the big screen for all the world to see. Anarkali’s bold and defiant public expression of her love for the prince before the Emperor after her release from the dungeon in the dance song “Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya” in Mughal-e-Azam, which is its theme song, comes to mind.

Considering the staid way that the affair progressed over six or seven years, the way it all ended was a shock indeed. Publicity and scandal had been carefully avoided. Madhubala had to endure some troublous attention from film journalists, perhaps a bit more than her fair share of it as a popular star, mainly on account of her stern father who prevented them, quite rightfully, from barging in on her sets while she was at work , which made them murderously angry with her. But this had nothing to with the affair. The fact that despite her father’s opposition the lovers carried on within discrete limits shows that he did not grudge her some privacy and independence as a young woman. It seems, however, that he had no intention of allowing her to marry Dilip Kumar.

On her part, Madhubala had been determined (before the breakup) to marry no other man than Yusuf (Dilip). In an interview with Filmfare she was bold enough to declare: “Nobody in the world has any right to interfere with one’s choice of a husband. I would marry only the man with whom I am very much in love”. Probably she was sure that her father would relent for the sake of her happiness. This was in 1955, and she was only twenty-two. The tragic irony is that the end of her relationship came barely a year later.

Dilip Kumar too had responded positively to Madhubala’s new independent spirit. He got his elder sister to go to Ataullah Khan and ask him to allow Madhubala to marry him, but he refused. When Madhubala had to withdraw from Naya Daur, where earlier she had been signed on to co-star Dilip, because her father objected to his daughter being taken for outdoor shooting in a distant location which he thought was not safe for her, Vyjayanthimala was made to replace her on the film by the producer. Still Dilip wanted to marry Madhubala. He even decided to give all the profits of the film Ganga Jamuna which he produced to Ataullah Khan so that he could marry Madhubala and she could stop working. This proposal was also rejected. Then, Dilip Kumar repeatedly urged Madhubala, in the presence of their senior friend Om Prakash as witness, to marry him that very day in his house where a qazi was waiting to perform the nuptials; but he insisted on one condition: she was to leave her father and not see him again! He said if she didn’t agree to this, he would leave her and never come back again. Madhubala’s reply was that leaving her father was impossible. So Dilip walked out of her life. Though Madhubala later made overtures through a friend to revive the relationship, Dilip Kumar didn’t change his decision.

The Naya Daur case, in 1956, made a revival of the relationship impossible. Ataullah Khan took his daughter away from the film, but refused to return the Rs 30000 B.R. Chopra the producer had initially paid her as advance. Chopra filed a criminal case against father and daughter for breach of contract and cheating, which in fact was thoroughly unfair. When the case was taken up the prosecution was heard to the utter humiliation of the accused. Dilip Kumar gave evidence against them. In the course of being cross examined, he said, “I love Madhubala and will continue to love until the day she dies”, cruelly reversing the conventional lover’s pledge. Meanwhile the accused had a good defence, which they were hopeful of presenting in the next session. Unfortunately, Chopra unilaterally withdrew the case before it was taken up for hearing again, because his film Naya Daur which he did with Dilip and Vyjayanthimala in the lead turned out to be a huge success, and he was no longer interested in recovering the money he lost on account of Madhubala’s father not returning the 30,000 rupees he had paid at the beginning. Madhubala and her father came to an empty courtroom on the day set for the second hearing. Denied a chance to redeem her honour by giving her side of the story, she wept. Her father taunted her: “You say he (Dilip Kumar) loves you. Is this love?”

About ten years after this, in 1966, Madhubala recovered enough of her health to almost complete a new film called Chaalaak , which Raj Kapoor was directing. When Dilip went to see her, she asked for his advice on some matter. She said to him “Would you do another picture with me if I get alright”. Feeling extremely sorry for her, he replied, “Of course, I will do a picture with you. You are going to be alright, you are perfectly alright…”.

For a few days before her death, Madhubala was heard murmuring “God, I don’t want to die. God, let me live…”. But finally, she died. The day she died (23 February 1969) Dilip Kumar was shooting in Madras for A. Bhim Sen’s Gopi. He had felt restless the whole day that day. He heard the news about her death on arriving in Bombay in the evening. When he went to pay his last respects to the woman he had loved and most probably still loved, the funeral was over.

Making the General English Paper Compulsory for A/L Students

Making the General English Paper Compulsory for A/L Students (Previously published in The Island/Sri Lanka) The Higher Education Minister’s decision to make the General English Paper compulsory from this year onwards for all A/L students seeking admission to universities should be hailed as a good initial step in the right direction, i.e., towards ensuring that all our university students whose mother tongue is Sinhala or Tamil acquire a good command of English as a second language to enable them to access the ever expanding reservoir of global human knowledge and culture. Yet, the move is bound to be a controversial one because such a decision is most likely to affect the rural students who are at present faced with a severe scarcity of resources for learning English including teachers. But, according to newspaper reports, the Secretary to the Ministry has offered (what should be considered) a temporary solution: candidates who have been deprived of a chance to learn English can mention that fact in the paper (though it is not clear to me how this information is going to be relevant); and, poor performance at the English test will not affect their prospects of admission to the university. Such concessions are meant to initially prevent students from being put at a disadvantage on account of their lack of English. But before long the compulsoriness of general English language proficiency for all university entrants must be asserted in earnest, for that is what is important. (Since a key concept in this essay is what is known as “a second language” it would be appropriate to offer a widely accepted definition of the term: “A language which is not a person’s mother tongue, but which is learned in order to meet a communicative need…” – David Crystal, The Penguin Dictionary of Language, 1998. We have our extremely well developed indigenous languages for all our communicative needs within the country. However, in the highly globalized world of today we need to be able to communicate with the rest of the world in almost all possible scenarios: education, work, business, science and technology, media, culture and entertainment, diplomacy, and what not. Relevance of English for us is foremost in education. In our particular context, with our historical background, we find English to be the easiest and most useful medium available for global communication. Mastery of English as a second language gives us the ability to function in all the above spheres as well, or nearly as well, as we can in our first language. This is what the patriotic pioneers of language reforms envisaged fifty-five years ago.) The ministerial decision to make the General English Paper compulsory for the A/L is a welcome move because it is predicated on the acknowledgement of the vital importance of English for higher education and global communication in the modern world, which provides a meaningful reason for the students to undertake the ‘hassle’ (as at least some of our students seem to view it) of learning English. To present English in a strictly utilitarian role will make it meaningful to the widest proportion of our student population. Although much English is in evidence in the country – in the media, education, business, banking, science and technology, sports, entertainment industry, and every other sphere of national activity – English as a fully fledged medium of communication is still limited to a small proportion of the population. English words may be freely sprinkled in the conversation of even the remotest village dwellers; in fact, this has been the situation for as long as I can remember, that is, for over fifty years at least, such ‘use’ of English cannot be taken as reflecting a widely prevalent general knowledge of English among the public. This means, in the opinion of many, that English is not so widely used as to assume national status; but the recognition of the fact will not detract from its real importance for us: its importance as a second language. The Higher Education Ministry’s move seems to envisage such a role for English, and this will go down well with the students and their parents from both linguistic communities. With the restoration of Sinhala and Tamil to their due level of prominence (to the status of official languages), English which had been usurping that position was rendered less important for them; not that it had been of very great significance to the majority of the population until then as it was something inaccessible. The change of medium of education from English to the national languages greatly benefited them. Among other things it made a good education attainable to many children regardless of their social class, who had been deprived of that opportunity before. Prior to the introduction of free education, the only kind of education which was of any value was English medium education. But under colonial rule this was restricted to a minuscule privileged class for imperial purposes. Through the central school system that the pioneers of free education initiated, a small proportion of talented rural youth were able to enjoy such an education. Still, English continued to privilege a small minority, and disadvantage the majority of the country’s population. Free education through the English medium for all the children of the country was unthinkable for many reasons. Sinhalese and Tamils with several millennia old sophisticated, highly evolved, and still vibrant literary traditions couldn’t be expected to abandon their own linguistic heritage in favour of an utterly alien language like English even in the course of a few centuries. Although the Higher Education Minister’s decision might smack of a degree of arbitrariness, it will prove beneficial in the long run. The success of the move will, however, depend on its acceptance by the principal stakeholders, the students themselves. It is impossible to believe that they don’t know the value of English. Why is it then necessary to force them to appear for an English test as a minimum requirement at the higher education stage? In fact they have had over ten years of instruction in English at school. Even in the remotest rural schools the students don’t totally lack facilities to learn the language. The failure of students to gain at least an elementary knowledge of English is mainly due to lack of motivation among other causes. Making the subject compulsory is a good way to motivate them. Then the teachers’ work will also be easy. The most effective way to teach any subject including English is to make the learners responsible for their own learning. Students must be made aware of the fact that there is much English around them: TV and radio have English language programmes; there are English language newspapers; there are billboards, posters, banners advertising things or announcing events, etc. Teachers and parents should encourage children to use these resources, without depending too much on school teaching. Learners of English need not entirely depend on books these days because the Internet offers rich resources for learning and practicing English. Therefore, a knowledge of English as a second language is, contrary to popular belief, something well within easy reach of all our students from the kindergarten onwards provided an essential attitudinal change is brought about. Unfortunately, this is not generally recognized. Making English compulsory will push the learners towards an appreciation of this fact. It must be made a compulsory subject from Grade 3 upwards. But we cannot forget the fact that, given our colonial history in which English was associated with power and privilege on the one hand, and oppression and deprivation on the other, it is difficult even today to extricate it from politics. The advantages that accrued to the masses when indigenous languages were promoted as the mediums of instruction can again be nullified by the reintroduction of the English medium, and only an already privileged minority will stand to gain from this. The alleged JVP objections to university students learning English may be due to the threat of a return of the English that had privileged a small minority at the expense of the majority. This should not be ignored by the policy makers. If they can convince the students that this time English is being promoted not with a view to bringing back privilege and attendant injustice, but to make it an equaliser. English becomes a means as well as a mark of privilege and rank when it is allowed to be possessed by only a minority. When it becomes common property, the special advantages that it conferred on some disappear. If all students have gained a good knowledge of English as a second language by the time they reach the A/L, it will enable them to continue their higher education in English as the authorities have decided, especially in subject areas such as science, engineering, medicine, etc where English offers better resources for mastering those subjects than the native tongues. But this should never mean a substitution of English for our native languages.

Is the Spoken English Initiative a Failure?

Is the Spoken English Initiative a Failure? (First published in The Island/Sri Lanka on Friday 11th March 2011) Nearly two weeks ago, I watched for myself what was being achieved in a non-urban school under the English as a Life Skill programme launched by the Presidential Task Force for English and IT. The purpose of this short write-up is to offer the interested readers some comments (for what they are worth) about the initiative based on what I observed on that occasion. It should be admitted that my decision to take a peek at what was possibly happening was not without some misgivings. Scepticism was foremost in my mind: How could such success as is usually claimed by those involved in the project be achieved with just a single period of spoken English per week taken by one teacher with at least some forty boisterous youngsters in a class? My live contact of about two hours with the school community left me convinced otherwise. For me this was a demonstration of the validity of the commonsense view that what matters in language instruction is not how long an activity lasts, but how creative it is, or in other words, how effective it is in stimulating further language learning. The visit took place on a Monday. It was made at short notice; except for the head of the school and the teacher in charge of the subject, it was a surprise to all others involved. I was lucky because on Mondays the morning assembly is conducted entirely in English by the children. After the assembly I was given the opportunity to chat with the children of two classes (Grades 9 and 13), which I used to test the authenticity of the English language skills that they had shown before. I regret that I was unable to spare more time for this encounter. It is a mixed school in a village setting, though not very far from the biggest town in the region. Few children who attend this school can be said to be from well-to-do families. Had their parents been economically and socially of a higher status, most of them would have succumbed to the popular myth that town schools necessarily provide better education, and admitted them to those schools. While some teachers and senior prefects were discretely and inconspicuously doing the little they had to do to maintain discipline, two girls from Grade Nine jointly announced each event in English, adding comments extempore, as appropriate. They started the programme with religious observances. This was followed by the singing of the school song, with the school band playing. A number of English items followed. One student presented a fairly detailed weather forecast for the day while another assisted her by holding up a large hand-drawn map of the island marked in English. The proceedings ended with the singing of the National Anthem, in which everybody took part. As could be expected, some prior preparation must have gone into this. But the children’s performance sounded spontaneous and natural. The teacher responsible told me that different sets of students manage the assembly each week. Later I saw the two Grade Nine students who conducted the meeting that day. I found that they were actually capable of doing any programme like that impromptu. Their classmates showed themselves to be equally confident of performing in English in a similar situation. Something that struck me, amidst all this prattle about ‘broken English’ being promoted through an inordinate insistence on speaking English ‘our way’, was that these students all used ‘good’ English; the few ‘errors’ they committed did not affect communication, and could have been easily and unobtrusively corrected by a conscientious teacher in a suitable context. My experience with the students of Grade 13 was similar, but slightly less reassuring. In any case, I felt that they are generally better motivated and also more confident about speaking in English and learning English than their predecessors. My impression was that as the English as a life skill project gathers momentum the successive generations of students will be more and more receptive to English as a normal practical part of education. Enthusiasm about English will catch on among the students, when they realise its easy accessibility and its potential as an indispensable resource for education. If such a high degree of success is possible in this particular school where I see no other special circumstances that could have contributed to that success than what I am setting forth below, a couple of paragraphs down, then we can easily hold out the hope that the project should fare equally well in any village school with minimum facilities available. This kind of broad assessment will not be objected to much, I hope, because speaking English is a skill that is easily and informally demonstrable. What strikes me more than this level of success is the implicit attitudinal change that the programme has brought about among the children, parents, and teachers towards the learning of English. (I don’t think that it has anything to do with speaking English ‘our way’ though, because it makes no sense to the learners, nor even to many of the present day teachers. Have the (numerically small) general mass of Sri Lankans who are proficient in English ever spoken the language in any other way, except perhaps an ill informed minority among them who might have hankered after an imaginary posh accent? Why should the average young teachers of today who themselves lack, for no fault of theirs, any very advanced knowledge of English be burdened with standards and varieties over much? It goes without saying that it is useless to discuss different ‘forms’ of English in the hearing of the young Sinhalese- or Tamil-speaking children who are just approaching English because their teachers and parents want them to. Let them just pick up the English that is around them – the neutral English that permeates the whole English speaking world, for that’s the only English that matters to them for education, for work, and for intelligent interaction with the outside world.) The often criticised restriction of spoken English to one timetable period a week is because of the need to be in keeping with the existing rules and regulations. As I tend to believe, changes will be introduced in the future when it gets established as a compulsory part of the English syllabus. The success of any project depends on the proper coordination of three essential elements: an ideology, a plan of work based on it, and actual implementation of the plan. The English speaking programme also has these three aspects. To explain the achievement level that the school I visited has attained I will need to refer to all of them.But here I am only focusing on an instance where the third element is being realised in specific circumstances. That English was the possession of an exploitative minority of the population which oppressed the masses is too well known to need reiteration. Some sought English as a mark of privilege and status. Those times are now fast disappearing. Today we need English as a tool, as a resource. New vistas are opening before us in which our forging ahead is hampered by lack of English. What we need is a practical knowledge of English involving all the four basic skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In the past, we used to put a premium on reading and writing English in our examination based education culture. The ability to communicate in English in many live situations, especially in education and work, is being emphasized in Sri Lanka as it is in many other countries of the world. We value English as a communication tool, rather than as a mere badge of privilege. Using a tool is a skill. The mastery of a skill comes from constant practice of the skill, not from storing factual information about it in one’s memory. According to the second language learning ideology implicit in the programme, learning (knowledge) is apparently viewed as socially created; it isn’t supposed to be acquired through individual cramming in isolation; students practice speaking with their colleagues in classroom contexts devoid of anxiety. This is a kind of constructivist approach. And learning is not expected to be confined to the classroom. Students are encouraged to reinforce their learning by drawing on outside sources as much as possible. In the school I visited the teacher in charge of the spoken English lesson is deeply committed to her work. She has organized an abundance of interesting activities for her pupils to practice their English. The activities and materials used are specifically designed for the pupils of her school with their social background and their attainment level in English in mind in terms of the ‘Hydrabad methodology’ (that the teachers are trained in during the initial 10-day workshop that is conducted). She coordinates her work with the work of the other English teachers. There is no doubt that the spoken English teacher’s work both supports and supplements their work which is more exam-oriented. The principal of the school is exceptionally dedicated to the cause of promoting the language skills of the students. He focuses on all the three languages. He told me that he has in Grade 13 a number of Sinhala students who can carry on a conversation in Tamil quite fluently. Where English is concerned, he told me, though he is not himself a teacher of English, he used to organize, with the encouragement of the regional director of English and with the help of his own English teachers, special activities to promote the language skills of the students even before this new initiative was introduced. He has made it compulsory for all the students to exchange a few words in English with their English teachers; he has asked the English teachers not to respond if any student speaks to them in Sinhala contrary to his advice. He needs all other teachers to speak in English with the English teachers. He encourages the English teachers to speak to him in English. It was obvious to me that the enthusiasm and the active involvement of the school head is making a great contribution to the success of the English as a Life Skill programme in this school. It is no surprise that the other teachers and parents wholeheartedly welcome this initiative. The bright prospects for success that the Spoken English initiative demonstrates in this school, in my opinion, are due to the committed involvement of the students, teachers, school authorities, regional education officers, and parents in combination with the features of the English as a Life Skill that make it attractive to these different stakeholders. However, it should be added that for work well begun like this to continue to maintain its excellence usually calls for supportive supervision as well as recognition not only from the school and regional authorities, but also from the national educational hierarchy.

Education and Teacher Dispositions

Education and Teacher Dispositions
(First published in The Island/Sri Lanka)
Taking a fairly long walk has become an essential part of my daily routine for some time now. From the beginning I saw to it that my calf muscles start aching before I stop walking. Through experience I have determined the distance that should be covered, and the time it should take to produce that amount of fatigue in my legs in the particular terrain where I daily perform this exercise. Occasionally, circumstances intervene, and I am required to curtail my walk before I reach my ‘saturation point’, which leaves me with a sense of having cheated myself. Once I pondered over why I get this feeling, and traced its origin to these words of a favourite teacher of ours: “Don’t think that you have done an honest piece of work, be it in sports or studies, unless you feel a little exhausted after doing it”. He taught us a subject known as General Science at that time some fifty years ago, and sometimes doubled as our PT master. He was a strict disciplinarian and a committed teacher. We used to await his arrival for lessons with trepidation as well as expectation. If I am confident enough to make any claim to at least a modest degree of professionalism in whatever work I undertake, I believe I owe that confidence to what I learned from teachers like him.
Many of us have recollections like these about our favourite teachers. Often we do not remember them for the subject knowledge they imparted. We remember them for the influence they exercised on our lives through their dispositions or perceptions or attitudes as revealed through their behaviours towards us their students. Teacher dispositions are vitally important for long-term as well as short-term student success in terms of academic achievement and personality development. That is why some of our old school teachers seem to reach out to us over many decades from the past.
The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) in the USA, a national organisation that helps establish the preparation of high quality teachers, specialists, and administrators by conferring accreditation to schools, colleges, and departments of education describes teacher dispositions as “Professional attitudes, values, beliefs demonstrated through both verbal and non-verbal behaviours as educators interact with students, families, colleagues, and communities” (as quoted by Maura Kate Hallam in ‘The Language Educator’, January 2009).
A key factor that is essential for academic success is student engagement. Engaged students are those who involve themselves in educational activities out of intrinsic motivation; they are self-reliant; they make themselves responsible for their own learning. There is a second equally important factor which contributes to student achievement: students’ perception of their own academic competence (which means positive feelings about one’s ability to be succeed academically). Students’ active involvement in the educational endeavour and their perception of academic competence are both important attitudes that play a central role in student success. These attitudes flourish in an atmosphere in which students have a sense of autonomy, and feel confident in their own capacity for success in future academic pursuits. Two factors are vital for stimulating such attitudes: supportive teachers and high behavioural expectations.
Desirable student attitudes are formed as a result of learning experiences in an educational context dominated by these elements. Social stimulation through examples and opinions of teachers, parents and peers also play a part. Canadian Professor Albert Bandura is often considered the father of the cognitivist movement (as opposed to B.F. Skinner’s behaviourism). According to his observational learning (or social learning) theory, a model’s behaviour can cause an observer’s behaviour to change either positively or negatively through the positive or negative consequences (vicarious reinforcement or vicarious punishment) of a model’s behaviour. He looked at personality as an interactive relationship among three elements: a person’s environment, behaviour, and psychological processes. Teacher dispositions affects the formation of learner attitudes.
Educators need to possess positive dispositions in addition to subject knowledge and pedagogical (i.e. teaching) skills. The NCATE mentioned above expects schools of education to assess their candidates on the principles of fairness, and the belief that all students can learn. Some researchers regard commonsense notions about teacher perceptions to be too ‘soft’ to serve as real research, insisting on quantifiable data. Mark Wasicsko, Director of the National Network for the Study of Educator Dispositions (NNSED) does not agree. He explains, on the organisation’s website, that effective teacher dispositions can be grouped into four ‘measurable’ domains as suggested below:
1. Most effective teachers perceive themselves as such. They are competent, and have confidence in their own ability. Capable teachers are usually outgoing in social interaction; they can identify with a broad range of diverse people.
2. Effective teachers believe that all students can learn.
3. Their frame of reference is broad. They relate what they do to a larger purpose. Teaching for them involves creating a disposition for learning.
4. Such teachers take cognizance of the human element.
Teacher dispositions are important in any educational setup, but they are particularly so in the English language classroom, which I wish to use here as an example to demonstrate teacher dispositions. For effective language learning to take place, as much communicative interaction among the learners as possible through English should be provided. Their ‘affective filter’ has to be lowered by making them feel comfortable, confident, and uninhibited. [“Affective filter” refers to an impediment to learning brought on by ‘affective’ (i.e. emotional) responses to one’s environment in terms of a hypothesis first proposed by Stephen Krashen in the 1970’s.] The teacher’s attitude determines much of the general atmosphere of the classroom and can either lower or raise the learners’ affective filters.
Of course, the English classrooms in Sri Lanka are not what they used to be in the past. Teachers seem to have a more inclusive attitude than before: for a long time there was a widely held notion, especially in rural areas, that only some students had the ability to learn English; many lost interest in learning it, and turned their attention to something else; even teachers gave up on them. But today English is being taught on the basis that it can be learned by all students; exclusivity associated with English in this sense is a thing of the past (No allusion is intended here to exclusivity based on class consciousness which, to all appearances, is a thing of the past as well). Different pedagogies are being tried out. The students have ample opportunity to relate the English they learn to their experience of the wider world through technology-mediated communication. In this context, teacher attitudes assume unprecedented importance.
Because learning has become learner-centred and autonomous more than ever before with the emergence of revolutionary new information and communications technologies, the teacher’s value as a mere conduit for the transfer of subject matter knowledge has substantially decreased. While teaching or instruction in the traditional sense has not become totally irrelevant, the stage manager role of the teaching professional has become more pronounced (To stage-manage in the formal educational context means to prepare the environment and plan the range of activities that the learners must perform both autonomously and in collaboration with colleagues for the achievement of a predetermined outcome through managing the interrelationships between the school setting, student attitudes and behaviour, and student achievement). In the final analysis, teacher dispositions are about bringing out the individual best in each student in the short term as well as in the long term (irrespective of the calibre of that ‘individual best’).
Sources consulted:
Maura Kate Hallam: The Language Educator, January 2009
Theresa M. Akey, PhD: “Student Context, Student Attitudes and Behaviour, and Academic Achievement” (Paper), 2005

Mother Tongues and Multilingual Education

Mother Tongues and Multilingual Education
(This appeared in The Island/Sri Lanka before)
The term ‘multilingual education’ which embodies the idea of using at least three languages in education, namely, the mother tongue, a regional or national language, and an international language was adopted by the United Nations’ Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at its General Conference in 1999. As one of its important roles, the organization provides international frameworks and parameters for educational policy makers to guide their decisions about complex issues. Language, or rather the choice of the language of instruction, is one such area. A 2003 UNESCO position paper about mother tongue and multilingual education makes this observation: “While there are strong educational arguments in favour of mother tongue (or first language) instruction, a careful balance also needs to be made between enabling people to use local languages in learning, and providing access to global languages of communication through education.”
The UNESCO deals with the linguistic rights issue in multilingual societies in accordance with three basic principles:
UNESCO supports ….
1) “… mother tongue instruction as a means of improving
educational quality by building upon the knowledge and experience
of the learners and teachers”,
2) “… bilingual and/or multilingual education at all levels
of education as a means of promoting both social and gender equality
and as a key element of linguistically diverse societies”,
3) “… language as an essential component of inter-cultural
education in order to encourage understanding between different
population groups and ensure respect for fundamental rights”.

The ‘multilingual’ education system we are so assiduously working to establish will most likely give rise to a situation where the sort of linguistic rights concerns we have seen raised by linguists in affluent countries with concentrations of immigrants from diverse cultures could apply in respect of our indigenous languages Sinhala and Tamil. This will be so unless we keep a due sense of proportion in the pursuit of excellence through English. In a context where English occupies an privileged position the speakers of local mother tongue languages are at a disadvantage; and it will be again monolingual education through English, not multilingual education. It could be a scenario which will call for the invocation of principles established over the past half a century by the UN for the protection of the linguistic rights of especially minority communities.
As early as 1984 Professor Tove Skutnabb-Kangas of the University of Roskilde, Denmark suggested four different definitions of mother tongue from the perspectives of origin, identification, competence, and function. Mother tongue by origin, she explained, is the first language that a person learns; mother tongue by identification is of two kinds: a) by internal identification, i.e. the language one identifies oneself with, and b) by external identification, i.e. the language that others associate one with; if competence is the defining element, then one’s mother tongue is the language that one knows best; and finally, mother tongue by function means the language that one uses most.
Professor Skutnabb-Kangas discusses her ideas again in an essay in 2008. She considers how definitions of mother tongue could be made relevant to linguistic minorities found within a multilingual society including such linguistic minorities as the deaf who need an appropriate sign language, and the forcibly assimilated Indigenous or other minority children. She thinks that the four short definitions she has described converge for a linguistic majority; but she avers that for linguistic minorities “often a combination of mother tongue definitions by origin and by internal identification is a good mother tongue definition.”

Professor Skutnabb-Kangas’s attempts in this connection reveal her concern for the protection of the linguistic human rights of minorities. The same attitude is shared by other Western linguists such as Jim Cummins of the University of Toronto, Canada, and Nadine Dutcher of the Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC. USA, who have had the experience of pitting minority languages against a dominant majority language (e.g. in Denmark the sole official language is Danish which is spoken by 90% of the population, while among the minority/foreign languages are English 86%, German 58%, and French 12%; in France the single official language is French with minority languages such as Maghrebi Arabic, Berber, Turkish, etc). They are especially interested in the language rights of immigrant populations in the affluent European and North American societies, and in allied countries where the local languages are both the majority languages and the dominant languages, and where ‘linguicism’ is identified as threatening the linguistic rights of minorities. {Linguicism is a concept and a coinage proposed in the mid-1980’s by Professor Skutnabb-Kangas. It denotes what she calls "ideologies and structures which are used to legitimate, effectuate, and reproduce unequal division of power and resources (both material and non-material) between groups which are defined on the basis of language." The words quoted are reproduced from Wikipedia.}

The suitability of what Skutnabb-Kangas suggests as a good definition of ‘mother tongue’ for minorities (“a combination of mother tongue definitions by origin and by internal identification”) to contexts where the language of power is also the language of the majority as in the European and North American countries is clear: it recognises the right of individual members of linguistic and cultural minorities in such societies to adopt, out of the diversity of languages available, the language that is closest to them as their mother tongue.

Sri Lanka’s multilingual situation is the reverse of that found in Europe and North America because the language of the majority (Sinhalese) cannot be called the dominant language here. Both Sinhala and Tamil are official languages, and English is designated in the constitution as a link language. Those who can speak English form a little less than 10% of the population (9.9%). Only about 10,000 people out of a population of roughly 20 million are said to use English as their first language. (“First language” here must be taken as identical with mother tongue, for if the term ‘first language’ is defined as the language someone mainly uses to function in in day to day life, as in education, scientific research, professions, and commerce, then this figure should be substantially higher since English serves as the first language in this sense for many educated Sri Lankans whose mother tongue is Sinhalese or Tamil, which is their usual home language.) The significant thing, nevertheless, is that English dominates the linguistic scene in our society. So, whereas in UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc English dominates as the language of the majority, in Sri Lanka it dominates as the language of a minority. In other words, we have the case of a (numerically) minority language usurping the place of a majority language.

In the Sri Lankan context, however, the term ‘minority language’ when applied to English can be misleading in view of this reality. Though it is the language of a numerical minority, in terms of its influence particularly in such fields as education, research, business, and international communication, it functions as a ‘majority’ language pushing the indigenous languages into ‘minority’ language status in that sense. This dominance of English is not one of choice, but the result of a complex of historical, political, and economic factors specific to our country reinforced by the impact of the phenomenon known as globalization.

A new manifestation of the West’s capitalist domination of the world, globalization is an inescapable fact of life today. It may be an unmixed blessing for business people and industrialists since it opens extensive markets for industry and commerce. Yet it’s not so for others. Though it’s mainly to do with business, it draws the nations together in all important spheres including education, leading to general progress in those areas. But globalization is not always for their benefit. Among the iniquities that it brings in its wake is its tendency to increase the gap between rich and poor nations. Political instability, terrorism, and civil unrest either caused or compounded by economic hardships encourage large movements of people as helpless refugees or desperate job seekers from poor countries to rich countries.
The movement of populations is thus usually from the poor countries to the rich. The resultant cultural diversity of societies in the host countries is viewed in opposite ways by sections of the local populations: some tolerate it, some don’t. In Canada, for instance, according to Jim Cummins of Toronto University the neo-fascists want immigrants expelled or at least excluded from mainstream society, while the more liberal groups want them to be assimilated. Professor Cummins feels that exclusion and assimilation are similar in that both regard cultural diversity as ‘a problem’ that should be made to disappear.
In Cummins’s view, this way of looking at the phenomenon of cultural diversity that is dominant in EU and North American countries can have disastrous consequences for children and their families. The reason is that assimilation policies tend to discourage students from retaining their native language and culture for fear that it would hinder their ability to identify with the mainstream culture. The subliminal message that is conveyed to them is that they must renounce their allegiance to their home language and culture if they want to be properly integrated into the host society. This involves a violation of UN-recognized human rights (related to language) of communities affected.
Apropos of the multilingual situation in Sri Lanka, there is no question about transforming our education system from monolingual to multilingual status. Probably, however, what multilingual education in our specific context does or should mean is still not clear to many though they think they know. The popular perception seems to be in terms of a so-called quality education through the medium of English with or without a knowledge of Sinhala and Tamil (the mother tongues of 95% of the population). (I’m not saying that this notion corresponds to the policy of the official trilingual plan now underway.)
It has been long established that for a child’s proper education, particularly in the first years, the mother tongue/the home language is the best medium of instruction. Cummins refers to his own writings, and those of others such as Baker and Skutnabbs-Kangas among more recent researches in the field to confirm the importance of the mother tongue for the education of bilingual children. As educators these authorities hold that “children's cultural and linguistic experience in the home is the foundation of their future learning and we must build on that foundation rather than undermine it; every child has the right to have their talents recognized and promoted within the school”. School education should not squander “the linguistic, cultural, and intellectual resources they bring from their homes to our schools and societies”. Though these statements were made in connection with multilingual societies different to ours, the importance of the mother tongue for children’s education, and through it to the society at large is the same.

Language, Culture, and Development

Language, Culture, and Development
(First published in The Island/Sri Lanaka)
Any human society can be described as a product of three interrelated, mutually dependent processes which are coterminous: language, culture, and economic activity. Social interaction motivated by our innate gregariousness as a species is at the root of these processes. Though almost certainly they had a common origin at the dawn of human civilization these processes, taken in isolation, are today found to have become infinitely sophisticated and multifaceted. They can be looked at from different perspectives, assigned specific functions, and given appropriately diverse definitions. For example, language is much more than just a medium of communication; culture is infinitely more complex than what a dictionary definition like “a way of life of a particular group” or “a set of beliefs, customs, and art forms characteristic of a community” might suggest; similarly, economic behaviour comprehends an infinity of activities around “organized operation of processes of producing wealth, commodities, services, etc”. But they still serve the rudimentary purpose for which they came into being: supporting the survival of the human species by securing their needs for food, clothing, and shelter in interaction with the natural environment (economic activity), which is facilitated by a mechanism for communication with each other (language), and which is subject to a system of customs, beliefs, values, principles, and rules established to control their individual and collective modes of behaviour (culture).
By ‘language’ is meant the language faculty which is common to all humans. Human language manifests itself in thousands of different forms which we call languages. Probably, at the beginning, our cave-dwelling ancestors lived in groups only marginally different in organization from other apes. With the gradual evolution of the social group through collective economic activity, language, and culture from their nascent state humans became the most successful in their long struggle for survival against nature’s unfriendly phenomena including the threat of wild animals; this may explain humanity’s unique expansion across most inhabitable parts of the earth (and perhaps, correspondingly, the extinction of other competing species engaged in a losing battle with them).
Now, the feature that most distinguishes humans from other animals is their language faculty, an aspect of the power of their highly evolved brain. Undoubtedly, greater language ability gave humans a competitive edge over other allied species in evolutionary history. It goes without saying that language largely accounts for human ‘superiority’ over other animals in the matter of controlling nature. Humans control nature not only to ensure their survival, but to increase their physical comfort and mental happiness. It is through language that knowledge about the world is created, transmitted, preserved, retrieved, and tried out, reviewed, and enhanced. Language is knowledge. Applied knowledge is key to the creation of wealth. As Peter Drucker writes in his book The Age of Discontinuity (1969) knowledge is “… central to our society … as the foundation of economy and social action”. If knowledge is a prerequisite of an economy the connection between language and economic development need hardly be stressed.
Though controversy about language policies has dominated at least half a century of Sri Lankan politics, neither the general importance of language nor its central role in the promotion of economic development received due recognition in our education sphere until recently. This is evident in the relatively low importance that was attached to the study of languages with an emphasis on their functional aspect in our school system. However, at long last, an attempt is now being made to solve the problem through the government’s ten year trilingual programme for teaching schoolchildren the three languages of English, Sinhalese, and Tamil. The governmental initiative has resulted in growing popular awareness of the economic usefulness of learning languages among other benefits.
In the highly globalized and technology-driven world of today English is the most important language we need to possess as a tool of economic development. It is both convenient and beneficial for us to adopt English as a second language in order to interact with the rest of the world in all areas including economic development not only because of the English language legacy left by 150 years of British colonisation, but also because of the recent emergence of English as the single most powerful common language of global communication. There’s no question about this. However, the message implicit in the fact that English is still a closed book to more than 90% of the country’s 20 million people even after 200 years of its dominance on their affairs cannot be overlooked. The current three language enterprise seems to have taken cognizance of this message.
As American anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir (1884-1939) pointed out language, in addition to being a vehicle for the expression of thoughts, perceptions, sentiments, and values characteristic of a community, gives individuals social identity. He further said: “… the mere fact of a common speech serves as a peculiar potent symbol of social solidarity of those who speak the language”. Therefore a language is not something that you can take possession of or discard as easily as you can put on or take off a garment. This is the reason why English failed to establish itself in Sri Lanka as the common tongue of its people despite its dominant position in government and business. There already were the indigenous languages of Sinhalese and Tamil to give the respective speakers of those languages their cultural identity and sense of social solidarity.
Ignorance or deliberate repudiation of their own history and culture leads some people to underrate the indigenous languages, Sinhala and Tamil. For the overwhelming majority of us these languages are vital in the sense that Sapir explained. The change of the medium of instruction from English to local languages benefited the masses. The elevation of Sinhala and Tamil to official language status was also a bona fide move. Such measures were in the interest of the underprivileged masses and were meant to safeguard their rights. At the same time the very architects of these changes were not oblivious of the vital importance of English as a tool of modernisation, and initiated a tradition of teaching English to all schoolchildren from Standard Three onwards. But second language English teaching failed mainly because people don’t learn a new language unless there is a compelling reason for doing so. These days we hear about tens of thousands of young people appearing for Korean language tests in expectation of finding employment in Korea. No government encouragement was offered them for learning the Korean language. Still they took the initiative to learn it because they were motivated to do so by their desire to find lucrative job opportunities in Korea.
English should have been much easier for most of our students to learn because of the abundance of resources for learning it, and all the support that they were usually given to learn it. Their failure was not due to lack of these. It was largely due to the non-perception of a strong motive for learning English. But today the situation is different. Most students, parents, and teachers know that without a knowledge of English there’s no future prosperity. This will motivate the learning of English. At the same time, it’s good to remember that the wholesome development of a society comprehends more than mere material development. That society is truly developed whose members are not only efficient economic units, but also cultured individuals. As for Sri Lankans, they need all three languages (English, Tamil, and Sinhalese) to build such a society.

Education for Employment

Education for Employment
(Previously published in The Island/Sri Lanka)
Education is, ultimately, the process of acquiring the knowledge and the skills that are required for us to survive as a species. But we humans are too advanced and sophisticated to be satisfied with an education that is just adequate to meet this elementary need. Every human society, except for a few forest dwelling tribes, has an infinity of needs in addition to the very basics of life such as food, clothing, and shelter: accessories for physical comfort, health, entertainment, leisure, travel, schooling for children, and so on. The fulfilment of these needs calls for a workforce with the necessary knowledge and skills to provide the goods and services required. In modern times, an efficient workforce must be equipped with not only basic knowledge and practical skills, but a whole host of other resources such as managerial capacity, organizational finesse, familiarity with information technology, and professional values. It’s a major aim of education to enable the young to acquire these abilities, which qualify them for gainful employment.
Educational reforms introduced since the early 1970’s at least have all taken notice of the general criticism that our education system is not adequately employment oriented. Various curricular improvements have been introduced to address this problem under successive governments, though the problem hasn’t gone away completely. It may be that a government alone cannot solve the problem. The collaboration of the business and industrial sector, and the society at large is vital in this connection. It is heartening to see that there is evidence to show that things are changing in a meaningful way at last. The news item in The Island (07-09-2011) under the headline “A’Level students rush to grab jobs in BPO sector” is about a new encouraging development. It says that the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector is one of the many sectors that have been growing fast over the past few years, and that it creates job opportunities for professionals in an international setting. The great attraction that the BPO sector has for A Level students represents a new trend: many students prefer professional training and employment to a university education with doubtful employment prospects. The Lanka BPO Academy is an institution set up to train personnel for this sector. The popular Island columnist Yasas Abeywickrama (THE CATALYST/Monday) is associated with this academy. The contribution of young professionals like him is invaluable for the promotion of the education for employment concept among the youth.

But let me start with a sweeping look back at the past. The generation born around the time of independence are now in their sixties. Due to the political and economic reforms introduced after independence in the interest of the common masses, they were able to grow up in somewhat better circumstances than their parents had had any chance to (in terms of education, health, employment, standard of living, etc for instance). The present day young are the children of this post-independence generation. The younger generation have had the opportunity to grow up in a generally more egalitarian, independent, and materially less insecure atmosphere than their elders, even though amidst occasional political instability, corruption, and other setbacks exacerbated by internal and external vested interests, all of which appear to be inevitable concomitants of ‘democracy’.
Times have changed, changed utterly. For the masses, that is. The changes have been mostly for the better, and are most conspicuous in the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. These are naturally more evident to the older generation than to the younger, who might tend to take the status quo for granted: we have, hopefully, put behind us almost a lifetime of mainly destructive ‘struggles’ and are embarking on an age of goodwill and cooperation between sections of the body politic determined to move towards a common destiny as a young nation. Liberalised economic policies, despite certain limitations, have largely benefited the people. Social stratification is less severe; class, caste, rank divisions have begun to count for little. Culturally, our people are adopting more accommodative and adaptive attitudes than before.
Though positive changes have taken place in the educational domain as elsewhere since independence, such as free education for all the children of the country, the change of the medium of education from English to the mother tongue which benefited children from the Sinhala and Tamil speaking homes, the narrowly utilitarian literary character of general education inherited from colonial times hasn’t changed to the extent it should. In other words, changes in education have not kept pace with changes in other fields; education has remained largely irrelevant to the actual needs of the country.
The idea that education should involve preparing the students for a life of work as much as training them for a life of the mind is not new. In fact, all the various educational reforms introduced so far have drawn attention to the real problem of a lack of balance in our education system between book-learning and practical skills acquisition. Yet the bookish bias in education still remains. One reason for this is that work that demands manual exertion is considered inferior to work that requires mental effort. Practical skills mastery is looked down upon as suitable only for the ‘mentally less endowed’ in terms of traditional intelligence (IQ) testing which usually focuses on a general linguistic and mathematical ability. In the society at large the same attitude prevails. Other economically productive jobs such as agriculture, carpentry, various types of crafts, etc are reserved for the academically less promising. (However, this manual-mental distinction is more evidently unsupportable today.) Though there is a great demand for skilled professionals in these fields, there are a large number of educated youth who won’t fancy a career in any of them, and therefore are not interested in acquiring those skills. This is unfortunate. The bias against ‘manual labour’ is wrong, for whatever work people do also invariably involves knowledge and mental effort appropriate to it; this fact is more conspicuous in today’s knowledge world than before.
The downgrading of jobs in the most vital fields such as agriculture, building construction, manufacture of utility goods, food technology, handicrafts, woodwork, (to name just a few out of hundreds of possible examples) is a problem that must be addressed in the interest of the country’s economic wellbeing among other things. The main point is that it is partly a matter of misconceiving what is meant by ‘dignity of work’. Many of our people cannot get rid of traditional class-bound ways of thinking according to which certain jobs are considered to be of a higher rank than others. In education, this faulty attitude is reflected as a bias in favour of ‘academic’ subjects such as science, mathematics, and languages as opposed to technical subjects such as carpentry, plumbing, and dressmaking.
To promote vocational education among the secondary students in schools such harmful misconceptions need to be eliminated. The way to do this is to convince them of the fact that all forms of work are of equal dignity. What matters is not the public recognition that a person gets for belonging to a particular profession but the meaning it has for the worker and the society at large. Let’s teach our young to see work as an opportunity in the same way as the great American inventor, scientist, and businessman Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) did (and he warned others lest they miss it): “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work”. Edison is also remembered for having said “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”.
When education is not employment oriented, many educated young people are left without jobs even where jobs are found aplenty, but where persons with the necessary skills to take them up are few. This kind of structural unemployment accounts for a substantial part of the problem of joblessness in Sri Lanka. In this context, the importance of vocational education at the secondary school level need hardly be stressed. Secondary school graduates should be given a basic mastery of technical skills including computer knowledge that enables them to find gainful employment, if they so choose, instead of going to university, but still qualify themselves further academically while working. It is encouraging to see that a trend is now emerging where many young school leavers seem to think it wiser to enrol for vocational courses or find direct employment if possible and pursue higher studies autonomously. This is no drawback for students particularly in some fields such as business, banking, agriculture, motor mechanism, etc. Actually, a work environment is very helpful for focusing the mind. Work and study: each becomes a way to relax for employed students when the other tires them out.
The availability of such an option can be very attractive to many students and parents. It will naturally ease the pressure on the existing university system. It is true that university graduates, if successful in finding a job commensurate with their qualifications, do better than non-university graduates. But, in the case of many Sri Lankan graduate employees their education is often irrelevant to the work they are actually required to do.
Close cooperation between the education and industrial sectors is a vital economic factor for any country, for the most important asset it has is its youth. A country’s education sector is responsible for equipping the young people with the knowledge and skills that industrialists and business people demand.