The Need for Professionalism instead of Politics in Education

This article appeared in The Island on Wednesday 2nd September 2009.

I hope I won’t be accused of being an alarmist when I say that our education system is like a patient who has reached the crisis stage in his or her illness, i.e., the turning point at which the patient’s condition will suddenly change for better or for worse. This is how many concerned people may view the situation at present. It is a bleak impression that is being burnt into our collective consciousness by, among other things, the rash of examination-related incidents which seem acts of crass negligence and dereliction of duty by those paid by the public for doing the work they are entrusted with. The errors reported in the media would sound very stupid and improbable under normal conditions. Questions had been set which were open to criticism in terms of their meaning and appropriateness. Then, there was the case of the occurrence of some questions in a trial paper set by a tuition master in the south for his students allegedly later appearing in an AL paper. This matter was raised in Parliament by an opposition MP, but the charge was later met with a vehement denial of any ‘leak of the paper’. I wonder whether the authorities were able to make this denial convincing enough to the concerned public, before it was apparently swept under the carpet, though I don’t doubt that the dismissal of the charge was based on clear, acceptable evidence. Perhaps, the charge should have been more explicitly refuted. Next, there were rumours about incidents of copying (though I saw none reported in the media). A rumour circulating among some AL students and their parents was that at a particular exam centre set up at a premiere boys’ school there was significant copying during certain science papers where some students copied off a book that passed from hand to hand under the very nose of the invigilator who turned a blind eye to the cheating. (This of course is mere hearsay; I cannot provide any authority for it; but there’s no smoke without fire, as the saying goes. I decided to mention this to show that copying too could probably be included in the list of allegations.)

The ideas expressed in this essay are my personal views which, I believe, many others would share. I am voicing them here as a civic minded person in the hope that the exercise may in some small way contribute towards the amelioration of the educational prospects of our country. The essay should not be construed as an indictment of the persons handling the subject at the highest level. My opinion is that they are doing a difficult job as efficiently as the circumstances permit. The malaise that education suffers from in common with the rest of our public service is not of their making, but the evil legacy of decades of politicization of education and the resultant mismanagement under different regimes.

The errors in question papers, and numerous other lapses reported in the media, and also those unreported, but rumoured among the general public, seem so stupid and unlikely under normal circumstances, unless intentionally contrived, that they would naturally prompt many to suspect sabotage by unscrupulous elements among educational personnel both at the national and provincial levels against the government at the expense of our innocent children.. Whether such errors and lapses were acts of sabotage or genuine, unintended shortcomings is something that must be thoroughly investigated; and if there is reason to believe that offences have been committed, the individuals responsible must be punished, and the victims compensated in an appropriate manner.

In the absence of such investigations, to blame these glaring errors, and acts of commission and omission on supposed saboteurs in the department among those appointed to their posts in the past through political patronage by the main party in the opposition today is worse than an unsatisfactory answer to the problem, for it is a charge that could be invariably leveled back against the party currently in power, in the event of some reversal of fortune in the future, because, as far as we can remember, both the major parties have resorted to the practice of gratifying political supporters by appointing them to state institutions, at least in some cases irrespective of their qualifications.

The trading of charges and countercharges between the ruling party and the opposition has been a traditional ploy used by politicians to hide their own failures. This is due to the fact that politicians in general are mostly concerned with gaining and remaining in power whatever national interest demands. Education is one subject that must be treated as a vital national issue. Educational policies must be decided on, and formulated in consultation with the opposition so that periodic regime changes that are usual in a functioning democracy do not disrupt the smooth functioning of the system.

The abysmal inefficiency of our education system so plainly revealed in numerous crises brought to our notice by the media (school admission fiascoes, bribe taking school authorities, blunders in test papers, school textbooks of inferior quality, political patronage in teacher appointments and transfers, mismatch between the courses especially at the higher education level and the real needs outside, hooliganism among students who allow themselves to be manipulated by discredited politicians, and so on) cannot be obviated by the increasing number of new institutions opened, or fresh recruits absorbed into the system.

This state of affairs has left an immense vacuum, which private entrepreneurs are trying to fill with or (mostly) without government involvement. The economic losses or gains of this unofficial ‘privatization’ of education still remain to be calculated. What is certain, however, is that the state is in danger of losing its initiative in providing the nation with the proper education it needs to businesspersons, whose altruism or patriotism cannot be guaranteed.

There is a growing, already massive, parallel education system in the form of pre-schools, international schools, private tuition centres, and tertiary education institutions affiliated to foreign universities. These too run on wealth produced within the country. And it behoves the government to check that this kind of involuntary (total or partial) duplication of costs that the nation is called upon to bear is worth it, and that the country gets a fair return for its money.

Perhaps, private involvement in education is unavoidable in our present circumstances, (and privatization of education should not be treated as necessarily bad), but the state should not relinquish its fundamental responsibility for the education of the nation’s young. Since education is a matter of national importance it should not be entirely or even predominantly left to private enterprise. The government must properly regulate it so as to turn it into a useful adjunct to the state education system for the purpose of pursuing national educational goals set by the state.

The recent eruptions should be treated as the latest eye-openers to us in this context. Trying out palliatives without removing the root causes of the disease – in the form of ad hoc measures to make the symptoms disappear temporarily – is no solution. There is much more than meets the eye here. To completely reverse the downward trend in education will involve nothing less than our wholehearted commitment to a distinct, nonpolitical, national programme of reformation formulated through the consensual participation of all.

This might be a tall order. But it must be fulfilled for the sake of our children. However, we need not wait until that object is completely realized to initiate a meaningful rehabilitation of education. We can begin with the largest, most vital, most enduring factor of all in this connection: the management of the workforce, the human resources, i.e. the teachers and the administrators, that correspond to the soldiers, sailors, and the air force personnel and their officers who did the actual fighting in the battlefield against the terrorists in the recent civil war.

The possible way forward has already been demonstrated by the manner in which the successful military campaign against terrorism was handled by President Mr. Mahinda Rajapakse. He defined the government’s policy, provided the necessary executive direction, and entrusted the job to a handful of handpicked ‘technocrats’ (read ‘military experts’ in this case); the latter in turn inspired and led an army of 100,000 and other defence personnel on a heroic mission for the sake of a well conceived, invaluable, sacred, national cause until ultimate victory was achieved.

Education is a sacred cause of the same order. In fact, it will exercise more influence than the war on the generations to come, and will be on a much larger scale too, as its theatre of operations will be the whole of the island. However, it will be comparatively less expensive to the country. What is to be done basically is mobilizing the already available human and material resources. Like such matters as national defence and health, education is a subject that should not be entirely delegated to provincial control (at least as long as the present conditions prevail). Education must be centrally planned and implemented, with a degree of decentralization in certain areas such as teacher appointments, and transfers within the provinces, conduct of term tests, etc. subject to the central government’s approval.

The existing managerial hierarchy can be used with a few adjustments where necessary under the central authority of the minister of education. His responsibility will be as usual to execute the educational policy of the government, and provide the necessary financial wherewithal., and leave the management to a team of educational experts who are also good administrators, not dilettantes, or non-playing captains from other fields. All administrators must be people who had previously served as teachers at some level.

A prime responsibility of the establishment is to do everything possible to keep the officers and the teachers contented, subject of course to the inevitable economic constraints that a developing country like ours must face. It is only then that we could expect a high level of performance from them.

A mechanism for regular supervision and assessment of the teachers must be built into the system. The supervisor should not project himself or herself, or be seen, as an adversary by the teachers, but as a guide and a collaborator. The supervisor on any particular occasion could be the school head, a regional education officer, or a higher authority (all of whom are a part of the supervisory mechanism mentioned earlier). Each encounter with the supervisor should be a pleasant experience for the teacher, and an opportunity for further education and professional development. This I would describe as ‘collaborative supervision’.

It must be made compulsory for teachers to constantly update their knowledge, both in terms of their subject knowledge, and professional expertise. This should be ensured through short periodic tests, and interviews (which could be conducted during the supervisor’s visit).

Good performance must be rewarded through promotion to higher levels of the service, public commendation, or monetary benefits in addition to normal remuneration (any one or a combination of these as appropriate). When good performance is rewarded thus, unsatisfactory performance will be automatically punished, for such good prospects will be unachievable through means other than professional conduct.

Education, like the health service, is especially susceptible to financial exploitation by the unscrupulous. There are no quick fixes, and money should not be squandered on such. What I feel is that a lot can be achieved in education with the resources we already have plus a little more money which we certainly can afford to spend without much difficulty.

Professionalism instead of politics should be our slogan.

Rohana R. Wasala

What does it mean to learn a language?

Previously published in The Island (Wednesday 30^th September 2009)


The cue for writing the following came from Susantha P. Hewa’s well written piece “Improving fluency: thank Vs ‘thank karanna’” (Midweek Review, 09.09.09). Susantha’s thesis, as I understand it, is that one’s ability to liberally intersperse one’s mother tongue conversation with English words does not reflect one’s fluency in the English language and that one’s fluency in a language comes (to quote the writer’s own words) from “… acquisition or unconscious assimilation, which involves a number of automatic adjustments that a learner would experience over a period of time the length of which would depend on such factors like age, exposure and immediate language environment”.

This, I think, is a valid observation to make on an existing state of affairs among Sinhala speakers who have experienced some association with English. Such (intentional or unintentional) mixing of Sinhala vocabulary with a copious dose of anglicisms is probably an inescapable consequence of the psychological, sociocultural, economic, and political power that English exercises on us. English is still seen as a means of achieving and demonstrating social distinction in our country where most people harbour a diehard class-consciousness (a situation that must change sooner or later, sooner rather than later). But it also reflects a relaxed attitude towards a foreign language that was once feared as a ‘kaduwa’ ( ‘sword’- a symbol of inaccessibility as well as oppression).

But what makes us identify such anglicized utteranes as specimens of the Sinhala language? Though Susantha does not himself pose this question, a potential answer to such a query is implicit in his references to Sinhala suffixes such as eka, ekak, karanna as “agents of ‘sinhalizing’ those English words” introducing “the all important structural adjustments to fit all those English words into Sinhala” (italics mine).

The examples given in that article, though with a preponderance of English words, are recognized as Sinhala sentences because of their characteristic Sinhala linguistic structure. The structural adaptation of English words to the requirements of Sinhala morphology and syntax is achieved through the use of typical Sinhala elements such as the affixes eka, ekak, karanna.

In the study of language, structure refers to the patterned organization of linguistic features such as phonology (speech sound patterns), morphology (formation of words), syntax (the way words are combined into sentences), and semantic (sense or meaning) relations . The organization of these structural elements is rule-governed. For example, there are phonological rules, morphological rules, etc.

This is a highly complex phenomenon, and is what distinguishes human language from animal signifying systems. That language is biologically and genetically specific to the human species has not been conclusively disproved yet (This statement is subject to verification by the latest findings in the field, though). Humans are endowed with an innate capacity for language. Each of the thousands of different languages found in the world is a particular realization of this innate linguistic faculty in us humans.

All normal children have the unique human ability of acquiring the language spoken around them by unconsciously discovering the structural rules of that language, and applying them to construct the grammar of the language (i.e. they acquire what linguists call linguistic competence, or the declarative knowledge of language) which is stored in their long-term memory; but children must also learn the rules concerning how language can be appropriately used in a social cultural context, which capacity is called communicative competence or procedural knowledge of language. Learning a language involves the mastery of both of these competencies.

It has been proposed that the critical age for the acquisition of languages is from birth to age 7 years. Children are believed to be capable of unconsciously ‘picking up’ more than one language easily during this period, when the conducive environment for such language development is available.

The question has not apparently been resolved whether a second language (or even a third) is usually acquired in the same unconscious way or consciously ‘learned’ by adult learners (i.e. –for this essay- those who have already learned their first language, and also passed the critical age for language development). However, various theories about second language acquisition/learning have been offered. For example, Stephen Krashen (early 1980s) presented his acquisition/learning hypothesis. He drew a distinction between acquisition (the unconscious process through which children acquire their mother tongue) and learning (conscious study of the rules of a language that is done by language learners in a school, for instance). According to Krashen, conscious learning does not contribute to the acquisition process which, he maintained, is triggered by the learner’s exposure to natural communication in the target language. The learner’s conscious knowledge of the rules of the particular language functions only as a ‘monitor’ that checks the accuracy of the target language utterances that the learner makes by drawing upon his or her acquired linguistic system. (The tightrope-walk-like strenuous mental effort I made as a ten-year old, born into a non-English speaking family, trying to practice speaking English ‘correctly’, was perhaps due to this, I reflected much later.)

The acquisition/learning hypothesis is a basic assumption that underlies Krashen’s Natural Approach to second language teaching. One of the fundamental pedagogical implications of the hypothesis is that learners should be presented with an abundance of comprehensible input for the development of the ‘receptive’ skills of listening and reading at the initial stage; speaking is expected to ‘emerge’ subsequently.(This situation is supposed to parallel natural language development in children).

An alternative theory is that second language acquisition results from the activation of the same innate language learning mechanisms that cause first language acquisition.

These and various other hypotheses have both their advocates and their detractors. Though none of these ideas could claim anything like absolute validity, they nonetheless provide some strong strands of useful ideology for the formulation of practical pedagogies.

In a mass English-as-a-second-language teaching situation, we cannot solely depend on natural acquisition for success, because, though that would be ideal, it will clearly prove a luxury we can hardly afford in terms of time and resources. We need to resort to a golden mean. Opportunities for conscious learning (through overt teaching) and quasi-communication activities (in classroom generated ‘authentic’ situations) through English must be made available for the learners. In other words, a proper balance of acquisition and learning opportunities should be contrived.

In Sri Lanka today, there is a lot of English in use; it is no longer a menacing bogey. (The trend towards the emergence of a people-friendly English learning environment is being encouraged by the new English teaching project launched under presidential initiative.) English is becoming a familiar part of our day-to-day life. Hence perhaps the propensity among many to pepper their speech with some English words when they communicate in their native tongues, though in most cases this demonstrates a desire to flaunt a knowledge of English that they don’t really possess!

If the practice of seasoning their speech with a sprinkling of anglicisms replaces a serious attempt to learn the language by those who need to do so, such a scenario is only to be regretted as harmful to the future of English in this country as well as our native tongues. However, the penchant for communication in English evident among our people can easily be channeled in the right direction if the authorities provide the necessary leadership and guidance with the collaboration of the public.


Rohana R. Wasala

Adult Influence on Value-education and Personality Development among Children

Previously published in The Island (Saturday 9^th February 2008

Probably at no time before in the history of our country has there ever been exerted a more deleterious effect on children’s value-education and personality development by adults in every walk of life including the highest and the lowest ranks of society than at the present time. This is a very disconcerting observation that any responsible adult will make. Negative though such a comment may essentially sound, we should remember that the clear apprehension of a problem is the first step towards its solution.

I consider it relevant to reflect on the ideal role of adults who alone must shoulder the responsibility and who alone wield the power to initiate and maintain an instructive and inspiring relationship with children in this connection. Hence the following essay.

It is a commonplace comment that the older members of the society make that there is a general decline in moral standards among today’s young. The alleged moral degeneration is said to be evident, for example, in their failure to show respect to elders including their parents and teachers, their reluctance to offer a seat when traveling in a public conveyance to an elderly person or a pregnant woman, their love of noisy music, the uncommon propensity among them towards crime and violence, and the high level of approval that they show in respect of hooliganism during school matches, and ragging in seats of higher learning, and so on.

However, a little retrospection will be enough to reveal to ourselves the fallacy of such an observation. When we were young, we were subjected to the same criticism by our parents; they themselves had been similarly censured by their parents. Although we were then negatively judged by our elders, today we do not consider ourselves any worse than our parents were. On the contrary, it could even be asserted that we are probably more ‘moral’ than they were in certain respects. For instance, aren’t we relatively less concerned with class, caste or creed distinctions, don’t we believe more in social equality, and pay more attention to equal rights for both sexes than our parents did?

In all ages of human history there has been this adverse opinion held by older people about the apparent moral non-conformity among the youth. We come across instances of this in the ancient classical literatures of both the East and the West. The legendary founder of the Sinhala race, Prince Vijaya, had been exiled along with his friends by his father the king for his alleged delinquency before he accidentally landed in Lanka.

Usually the so-called ‘misconduct’ of the young is, in my opinion, a temporary phase of social adjustment – a period of trial and error – in which they try to come to terms with the new realities, which are naturally of little concern for their parents going to seed. Few young persons remain ‘bad’ for ever. Many reform themselves even if they have been criticized for misdemeanour before; in the case of others, what has been condemned as unacceptable by parents turns out to be something actually good, like certain forms of dress earlier deplored as unsuitable, or forms of entertainment such as social dancing which used to be frowned on by more conservative parents as immodest for girls in our country some time ago.

The older generation’s readiness to fault the moral standards of the young is due to their implicit assumption that they have arrived at an age when, for some mysterious reason, the young are born wicked. This, of course, is a total fallacy. The special moral wickedness that many adults attribute to the young people of today is no more congenital than it was in the case of their parents’ generation. I think the instances of so-called moral decadence among today’s young are really the result of socio-cultural heritage rather than skewed heredity or any other congenital aberration. By the term ‘socio-cultural heritage’ I mean the education and training that the older generation subject their offspring to voluntarily or involuntarily through their own specific moral conduct and its implicit ethical values. So when they accuse the young of low moral standards, they are blaming themselves.

In this respect many of us are blameless as individuals, but as members of a community we can’t escape collective responsibility for putting things right if there is any real erosion of ethical values among our youth. This responsibility devolves, in other words, on the older segment of the society – the social matrix which fosters the moral growth of the young. It comprises parents, teachers and all other adults who stand in a position of moral authority and influence vis-à-vis the young people of the country.

Children grow up at home enjoying the love and care of their parents, learning through both nature and nurture; play occupies them most of their time. Their moral education starts here. The growing children assimilate the vital ethical values implicit in the behaviour of their parents in addition to some basic knowledge about their environment that is essential for them to survive and flourish. That our culture recognizes this fact is evident in the Sinhala word ‘degurun’ which literally means ‘the two teachers’ and refers to ‘parents’.

When they start schooling, they leave the relatively small family circle and enter into the larger society of the school, where teachers take the place of parents. But the teachers must look after a large number of children in the school, which provides the kids a quite different milieu from their home background. Under normal, secure circumstances children are in their element in both these places.

When we consider our adult responsibilities towards the young, it will perhaps enable us to appreciate more the opportunities we have in this country to fulfill our obligations if we care to spare a moment to reflect upon the plight of thousands of innocent children in the unjust, conflict-ridden world of today who suffer in such inhospitable places as open streets, refugee camps, factories and battlefields.

Parents at home and teachers at school exercise an authority on children from which they cannot escape. It is with parents that they spend most of their time, though this statement should be heavily qualified in view of the fact that in the hectic modern society parents and children do not find themselves together at home as much as they would like since parents’ jobs and children’s tuition and other activities often keep both parties away from home much longer than in the past. In any case, generally, children spend less time at school with teachers than at home with parents. Because the length of the ‘contact period’ is an important factor in determining how much moral influence is brought to bear on the children in each case, parents could be said to play a greater role in fashioning their moral being than teachers particularly in the formative years.

There is another category of people that children interact with: this consists of their own older siblings, senior schoolmates, and adults other than their own teachers and parents that they encounter in the playground, on the street, in the bus and in every other conceivable place. Though this third group of people may not appear to exercise so dominant an influence on children as parents and teachers bring to bear on them, they do constitute a powerful element of the environment in which children grow up.

I view the element of authority or influence over children that characterizes the three groups of adults delineated above as a crucial agent in inculcating acceptable ethical values in the youth of any community. Children are taught or encouraged to look up to their parents and teachers, and other older people who come into contact with them in our still relatively tradition-dominated society. This is a good thing, provided, of course, that they are not made to demean themselves, or lose their personal dignity, or forfeit their right to independent thought in blindly following a tradition.

In western or western-oriented societies generally this authority status of adults in their interaction with children seems less important than in an eastern society like ours; in such a society children give up their dependence on parents in most matters at an early age, and their parents apparently believe that they have no right to interfere in their children’s lives beyond the early teens.

However, this is not to say that there are no exceptions to this general rule. I don’t mean this as a negative comparison. The western attitude has much to recommend it. For example, by freeing children from parental supervision so early, parents teach their children self-reliance; they avoid the risk of overprotection which is harmful to personality development. The same attitude prevails at the other end, too: filial obligations are not so ‘sentimental’ as in the East, though old, physically frail parents are not neglected.

Here our values are somewhat different. The eastern view generally is that just as parents have an obligation to bring up their children in the best way they can and to continue to protect them until they are well into their early adulthood, so do children have a duty to support their old parents who cannot fend for themselves because of age. In traditional eastern societies the observance of this principle is taken for granted. However, parents do not consider what they do for their children as sunset provisions for themselves, nor do children who support their old parents feel that they are settling old debts.

Today we are witnessing modernization’s relentless onslaught on such traditional mores. Modernization is broadly synonymous with the phenomenon of globalization that steamrollers all developing economies and cultures socially , politically and technologically. We may also assert that this global movement is the most modern form of the West’s political and economic domination of the world, which began about five hundred years ago in the Renaissance in Europe. Since material advancement is its hallmark, it invariably clashes with cultures like ours whose roots are less materialistic. Therefore in the face of modernization such values as the belief in parental and filial obligations may tend to erode, unless we are aware of this danger and do something about it.

Threatened or actual erosion of traditional cultural values could be seen by some as part of the price of material development. But it is difficult to underestimate the harmful effects of value-neutral trends on the wellbeing of the society as a whole, because it is sound ethical values that sustain and empower human beings in close-knit communities. When young people are made to overstep ethical bounds due to various reasons such as poverty, ignorance of parents, or evil societal impacts, they are pushed towards crime; it is then that they abuse drugs, rob, try to attack teachers, cheat at public examinations, and indulge in other forms of disruptive behaviour that we so often hear about.

Of values it is not only charity that begins at home; others begin at home, too. In other words, we should first observe values in the home environment before we do so in the society at large. Children learn socially acceptable modes of behaviour at home. Parents are responsible for this. It is useful to appreciate that bringing up children consists not only in feeding and clothing them, but also in educating them.

If children are to possess desirable qualities such as kindness, caring for others, industry, and honesty the older people at home must demonstrate these values in their own behaviour. No amount of preaching and teaching will be of much use where these qualities are observed in the breach. Practice is more important than mere precept.

It is generally accepted that a child’s character is decided by the time he or she reaches the age of five. So the first five years in a person’s life form the crucial period in which that person’s personality develops. If parents know this, then they will create the right kind of home environment for their children’s wholesome physical and mental development.

The most important component of that wholesome home environment is in fact parental love. When children are surrounded with love and caring, which is expressed both in words and deeds and gestures, they feel secure. A sense of security is indispensable for healthy emotional growth. It is a fact that most criminals have had a disturbed childhood.

Parents must be careful not to push their children too hard to satisfy their own exaggerated aspirations. Sometimes, parents, well-meaning though they are, tend to have ambitions for their children far beyond their native ability. When children fail to achieve these unrealistic goals set for them by their parents, frustration results, which is sometimes dangerous. Some years ago we heard about a rash of suicides among school children from Singapore and Japan, which were blamed on this kind of frustration.

Alienation from parents has been identified as one of the causes of rising juvenile crime in Germany according to sociologists. This is a social malady rampant in the West, but it is not rare in our own country. The problem of children abandoned by both parents, especially street children, is a current issue. There is also the problem of single parent families due to the absence of one of the parents as a result of foreign employment. So we are required to cope with new trends that threaten the traditional close-knit character of the family unit with deleterious effects on children’s mental wellbeing.

There is a growing younger generation of parents with the necessary educational background to provide their children the kind of parental guidance outlined above. That, indeed, is a happy prospect for the future of this country.

Teachers come next to parents. Most teachers are parents themselves with children of their own. The bond between parents and children cannot be duplicated between any other two groups of people, because parental love is unconditional. But, I think, the rapport between teachers and pupils very often comes close to that between parents and children in that the concern most teachers feel for the success of their pupils is selfless.

The school introduces children to a much wider social circle than their immediate families. On admission to a school children take a much bigger step towards socialization. In the initial stages of schooling the socializing objective is definitely more important than the information- or knowledge-acquiring process. Learning to read and write, and to deal with numbers, and computer literacy are all important, but they take a back seat in the face of the necessity for them to establish themselves as members of a society where they do not find the supportive presence of their parents, older brothers and sisters, and are suddenly confronted with the challenge of having to stand on their own feet. This is a crucial and critical phase of development for children. From the first to the highest grade of school they spend their time in the company of their numerous peers under the supervision of teachers. The period of schooling, which in Sri Lanka extends over more than thirteen years, is much longer than the five or six years of early childhood spent exclusively with parents at home, and its importance can hardly be exaggerated.

The loving, caring background that surrounds children at home must, as far as possible, be duplicated in the school. Emotional stability is essential for the development of a sound personality and also for educational success. A thorough sense of security forms the basis of such a conducive environment. Therefore the school environment must be a natural extension of the children’s secure home background.

The school stands between the protective home background of their infancy and the not so indulgent, but rather indifferent adult world where all people must ultimately live out their lives. Essentially the school society shares similarities with either: on the one hand it is like home for a child, with the teachers playing a parental role, and the children being required to share the same resources and pursue the same interests in an intimate setting; on the other hand the school environment resembles the wider adult world outside in that it includes something of the impersonal , anonymous nature of its population that we find in a more pronounced way in the latter. The school is, in fact, a microcosm of the outside world; it is a halfway house on a journey from childhood to adulthood.

My idea of a good school is one which leads its students from a position of relative ignorance to a state of greater knowledge with a parallel movement from personal immaturity to maturity through inspiration and discovery, rather than coercion. Given the innumerable pressures exerted on both the teachers and their charges such as the unwieldy size of classes, the diversity of the students’ social backgrounds, and the various administrative constraints, to mention just a few examples, the realization of such an ideal might be nearly impossible in any typical school setup. When such a conception of a school’s mission is made its overriding concern, it does not take long for the students to sense its presence and power and to respond to it positively by adapting their own conduct appropriately.

Most young students, even the childishly unruly ones, know when teachers are genuinely interested in their welfare without being told explicitly about it; they perceive it in the teachers’ work and their attitude. They will not often articulate their appreciation as readily as they would make it manifest in their behaviour towards their teachers.

The inspirational way of educating the young is never so easy as I may have suggested here; it is easier said than done, because there are many constraints that both teachers and students must contend with. Teachers and students sometimes do not agree about how best to move and clashes are bound to occur. But confrontation is least productive form of interaction between teachers and students.

It is best for young children when parents and teachers are able to inspire them through exemplary conduct.

The third category of adults comprises those who have an inevitable link with the young as members of the society at large, be they parents, teachers, or those of any other position with no direct connection with education. On a national scale all adults are parents and teachers and all the nation’s young are their children and pupils. Although the bond between the young and the adults they come into contact with outside the home and the school is obviously not so strong or intimate as the bond between parents and their children or that between teachers and their students, the intentional or unintentional influence that the adult world at large exercises on the youth of the country is significant. If all the adults behave responsibly towards the young though they may have no relationship with the latter as parents or teachers, then they will be acting in the best interest of the country.

In this capacity the third group of adults too occupy a position of potential authority with regard to the young, because the latter watch the behaviour of older people in their instinctive attempt to understand the social norms implicit in it. In schools children are taught the ethical principles governing our conduct in society. The effect of that teaching is undone when children see grown up people outside the school conducting themselves in ways that contradict those standards.

Sadly however, as far our society is concerned, there is no reason for any complacency on this score. As we know, it is the very people who are duty-bound to set a worthy example to the whole country who conduct themselves in the most despicable way, and that too in the most public manner.

Our children are condemned to live in a social environment steeped in violence resulting mainly from separatist terrorism, sectarian politics, and common criminality. The perpetrators of this violence are not from another planet. They are our own people who form part of the anonymous mass of the third group of adults we are here talking about. They all affect the young negatively.

Although ideally a society should be completely devoid of such undesirable elements, the inescapable reality is that violence is part and parcel of humanity’s lot. However, though it cannot be totally eliminated, it can be controlled. And this should be done by the good people of any society who, fortunately, are always in the majority. It is they who should both protect the young from those antisocial elements, and wean them away from being drawn into criminality.

In this essay I have considered the adult world as consisting of three main sections in terms of their interactive relationship with the young – parents, teachers, and others – only for the sake of description. The adult world is a unity. It is when all adults act in harmony with regard to the youth of the country in a responsible, supportive, and inspiring way that they can create the right environment for the healthy physical, mental and moral development of the youth, thereby ensuring a bright future for the whole country.

Rohana R. Wasala

Language, Education & Civilization

Language, Education & Civilization

Previously published in The Island on 7^th Wednesday 2007

To begin at the beginning I think that it is sometimes helpful to occasionally remember our evolutionary animal origin and to contemplate the fact that we can not possibly escape nature however highly advanced or exalted we consider ourselves to be. Watching how other animals learn the behaviours necessary for their survival could perhaps give us certain cues for understanding the complex idea that is embodied in the term ‘education’ in the same way as observing bird flight provided the pioneers of aviation with a useful analogy.

Learning – the process of acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary for physical survival, social living, and life-enjoyment – is natural to the young of all higher animals including humans. In most cases the young are put through a course of training by their parents at the end of which they are turned out into the wide world to fend for themselves. The preparation of young animals for their future life as adults is actually an inchoate teaching-learning situation in which the parent animals educate their young offspring.

The formal human teaching-learning activity usually covered by the term ‘education’, though cognate with the natural way other animals learn, far transcends it and comprehends, in addition to the rudimentary purposes of animal learning, the reclamation of the factual knowledge and the practical skills of the previous generations, the creative augmentation and preservation of new knowledge and skills, plus mind training and moral culture for the benefit and happiness of all humankind.

Among animals the teaching-learning process is mainly initiated and sustained by instinct, apparently without any contribution from reasoning, whereas human learning is a result of both instinct and intellect. In both animals and humans play dominates the mode of training initially. This play mode of education involves the repeated practice of adult activities by the young in an atmosphere of fun and freedom safe from the perils and uncertainties that these activities involve in the actual adult world.

We cannot stretch this analogy (i.e. the comparison between human and animal learning) too far. There is a world of difference between animal learning and human education. Animals do not possess anything comparable to human language that helps record and store knowledge for future generations, and that enables the enrichment of inherited knowledge through individual contributions. As for humans, they can recall the knowledge of their forefathers through records or collective memory, and supplement it with new knowledge that they generate by themselves, and transmit it down generations by means of language.

Among animals the training given before the assumption of adult responsibilities is based on instinctive practice that usually takes the form of play. Kittens, for example, engage in mock hunting by stalking and pouncing on each other in play; their mother sometimes brings them a small animal such as a mouse that she has caught without killing and allows the kittens to play with it. The kittens learn to hunt in this way. That is their grooming for life. They reinforce this initial training by gradually tackling real life situations through trial and error under the supervision of their mother.

In the world of humans the education of the young is not merely instinctive, and is not limited to the development of bodily skills alone. It is infinitely more an intellectual activity than the simple acquisition of muscular skills through the instinctive rehearsal of manoeures in the make-believe-world of play.

We cannot sustain the analogy between animal learning and human learning beyond a very basic point in view of the extreme complexity of the latter process. What makes human learning so complex is fundamentally the use of brain power – rational thinking and creative imagination - for processing information. Humans can gather information, share it with their neighbours, store it in memory or records, retrieve it, and relate it to their current circumstances and experiences, and so on. All this is due to the characteristically human faculty of language.

The sophisticated use of language distinguishes human learning from animal learning. It is true that many higher animals other than humans can be said to use ‘language’ in the sense that they too use certain ‘vocal’ sounds to communicate within their species. Like humans they have a limited number of these sounds. But the big difference is that whereas humans can arrange their vocal sounds and other elements in different patterns to make an infinity of sentences to express an infinity of meanings, animals cannot do this; animals have a finite number of calls to communicate an extremely narrow range of vital information relating to such things as food, sex, danger, etc. Human language has structure, but animal language lacks this feature. This fact has profound implications for any comparison between animal and human learning.

Our earliest ape ancestors must have adopted the same mode of ‘vocal’ communication as other higher animals do even today, and also a similar mode of learning. However, as they evolved over millions of years, they gradually grew out of that stage concurrently with the development of their brain power. It was the advent of language that transformed apes into humans. The growth of the language faculty was obviously not a sudden occurrence. It must have been a gradual process too. With the development of language the pace of human civilization (the development of humans as social beings) quickened. The generation and transmission of knowledge went hand in hand with this, both as result and cause, that is advancing knowledge and advancing civilization contributed to each other.

The movement away from animal status meant a departure from the rudimentary type of learning which was adequate for the bare survival of animals as individuals and as members of their societies. Humans moved on in sophistication while animals remained almost static. Humans must have overcome all those creatures which threatened their supremacy and survival in evolutionary history. Their position today would be unassailable in any conflict with their closest relatives in the animal world.

The physical, mental and social development of humans as a unique species required the collection, amelioration , and dissemination of knowledge within the different communities about the world in general, and about the vitally important crafts and skills, and the collective experiences peculiar to those communities. Language contributed to this process in large measure by being the main medium through which forms of abstract knowledge and practical skills were inherited, improved, and passed on from generation to generation.

It is this language-driven cultural process of the acquisition and transmission of human knowledge, and practical skills, which could be called education, that has propelled humanity to the present level of civilization. (I need hardly point out that I am not talking here about the education of single individuals, but of all humanity as a species.) The sustenance and further sophistication of human civilization is not possible without education. And language is vital for that.

To my mind therefore, education is the universal, language-based intellectual process by which humanity retrieves useful past knowledge of facts and skills, and wisdom from records and communal memory, generates new knowledge through discovery, and preserves it for posterity, while honing further their intellectual powers, and perfecting their actions for the survival, contentment, security and happiness of all, and for the constant betterment of the common human lot.

Nationalism and Communalism

First published in The Island of 20th Wednesday, February 2008



That ‘rabid Sinhala Buddhist nationalism’ is to blame for the ongoing national crisis in our country is treated as an incontrovertible truth by many members of the ‘liberal’ intelligentsia, both local and foreign, who offer comments on the problem. Some even appear to use it as an excuse for condoning LTTE terrorism. In a sense, such views are insignificant because they condemn something that is not there. But they also can do some harm: they mislead the powerful ‘international community’ whose cooperation is indispensable for the resolution of the conflict sooner or later.



Since these analysts and commentators, including the native ones among them, have no intimate knowledge of or familiarity with the ordinary Sinhalese Buddhist masses (due to the communication gap that exists between them), they tend to satisfy themselves with popular generalizations, which do not usually correspond to the reality. But if they had an opportunity to survey the opinions of the ordinary Sinhalese Buddhists – the majority of them are rural villagers – about the current crisis they would have been simply amazed by the latter’s anti-communalism, sense of tolerance, fair play and accommodation towards their minority compatriots, an enlightened attitude shared by the average members of those minority communities.



The ordinary Sinhalese do not even think about an exclusive ownership of the island or of a part of it. What they might say, if they were queried, is that from time immemorial Sri Lanka has been known as their native land, and that they have no other country to call their own; they also believe that they must share it with all the minorities who live with them, and that these minorities must enjoy the same rights and privileges as themselves, not less , not more. There are no traditional homelands in this country. The whole island is the traditional homeland of all the communities, whether majorities or minorities.



It is a gross misrepresentation of the so-called ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka to assert that it is a straight fight between the southern Sinhalese and the northern Tamils. Just as the ordinary Sinhalese do not claim the sole proprietorship of the island or a part of it the ordinary Tamils do not subscribe to the Tamil extremists’ claim that the north and the east constitute their exclusive homeland. In 1995 Tamils formed 9% of the Sri Lankan population, and the Sinhalese 83%. The Tamils live scattered among the other communities all over the island, with a large enough concentration of their population in the north and the east to form majorities in those provinces. In fact, more Tamils live in the south among the Sinhalese than in the north and east. Therefore the term ‘ethnic conflict’ is actually a misnomer. The conflict is between the Sri Lankan state and a group of rebel extremists who demand one-third of the land mass and two-thirds of the coastline for 9% of the population on an ethnic basis.



Some commentators try to reduce the national crisis to an internecine rivalry between those who came to the island first and others who did so later. This is a fallacy, too. Of the two communities Sinhalese and Tamils, whether they came to the island together or at different times, only the Sinhalese can be said to have developed a distinctive civilization in this island., the evidence for which is found in abundance.



There is an attempt in some quarters to explain away Sinhalese nationhood by asserting that the Sinhalese are a hybrid people, and that they have no claim to a distinctive racial identity. The truth is that no race on earth can satisfy the infamous Hitlerite insistence on the ‘purity’ of race, which was associated with the heinous crime of genocide inflicted on the Jews in the 1930’s and 40’s in Europe!

The racial stock of any ethnic community is, more often than not, a composite one with the probable exception of isolated jungle tribes such as the Veddahs of our country or the Pygmy tribe known as the Mbuti of the Democratic Republic of Congo. We don’t normally carry out DNA tests on individuals before we assign them to a particular race or ethnic group! In general acceptance a person’s ethnicity is determined in terms of physical characteristics such as colour of skin, shape of head, facial features and bodily stature, and cultural traits such as language, customs, religious beliefs and traditional modes of behaviour peculiar to a group of people that set them apart from other similar groups. Probably the language spoken by a race is its most vital characteristic. However, the language that is traditionally associated with a racial group also undergoes constant change, but it doesn’t lose its historical identity. The same applies to a race. All races share this quality of illusory constancy in flux much as a river that is given an unchanging identity over millennia perhaps in spite of the fact that its physical composition changes every fraction of a second.



The division of human societies in terms of shared racial and cultural characteristics is essential for the physical survival and overall advancement of the whole human race. We still talk about the awesome achievements of the ancient Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, and Romans, etc. They accomplished those astonishing feats of human endeavour as races through the refinement of their racially inherited knowledge and skills. The assertion of one’s racial identity and its meaningful expression for the common good of all humanity is a good thing. These divisions need not be fences that keep one group of people from another. Going beyond racial boundaries to reach out to the rest of the humanity is better, but the ‘Ascent of Man’ (though the very phrase smacks of gender-bias) is still well short of the level of sophistication which would make such ideal cosmopolitanism possible. Until humanity attains to that stage of development we must be content to live with our racial divisions. Yet we need not, nay must not, be so retrogressive as to condemn ourselves to racialism ( the fanatical belief in the superiority of one’s own race) that leads to ruinous hate and rivalry among people.



Racialism is not a common characteristic of the Sinhalese people contrary to what certain critics would have us believe. The Sinhalese are self-effacing even in their everyday appearance. Their everyday dress has no special features that reveal their race or religion. (The so-called ‘national dress’ – a long white ‘banian’ for the upper body and a ‘verti’ for the lower part - adopted and popularized by Mr SWRD Bandaranaike in 1956, later adopted particularly by politicians of both the main parties, and also by other community leaders as a means of identifying themselves with the ‘common man’, is today called, among ordinary people, the ‘kapati suit’ meaning the ‘garb of a cheat’!). What is more, they do not put any marks on their bodies to distinguish themselves from others. Their names do not always reveal their ethnicity either.







Even some apparently impartial commentators argue that the LTTE terrorism that has ravaged our country over the past quarter of a century was provoked by the essentially 20th century phenomenon of ‘rabid Sinhala Buddhist nationalism’. Nothing can be further from the truth. The division between the Sinhalese majority and the minorities was created and exploited by the British colonial rulers in pursuit of their own ends. And the Sinhala Buddhist nationalism which inspired and spearheaded the freedom struggle was unjustifiably identified with raw communalism and made a bugbear of by some minority politicians. The members of the majority race were required to black out their true history as it potentially hurt communal feelings of others. I learned from one of my teachers that the popular children’s novel (1939) by the Englishman Denis Clark entitled ‘Golden Island’ was banned in schools in the 40’s because it is woven round the story of the warrior king Dutu Gemunu (who ruled Lanka from 161 to 137 BCE). In the recent past, the teaching of history as a school subject was stopped for the same reason.



The Sinhala Buddhist consciousness is as old as the history of the island. In ancient times our country was known to the outside world as the Sinhaladvipa, (‘the country of the Sinhalese’ from which Seylan or Ceylon derives), Taprobane (from ‘Tambapanni/Tamraparni’), or Serendip (Serendib as Arabs called it from ‘Swarnadipa’ ‘the Golden Island’). The map of the island drawn by Ptolemy the Greek astronomer and geographer in the second century CE marks Anuradagama (later Anuradhapura) as the central city. It had been founded, according to one tradition, by a companion of Prince Vijaya, the legendary founder of the Sinhalese race. This national consciousness survived many vicissitudes of their fortunes amidst internal and external threats until the arrival of the Portuguese in 1505. Our country suffered foreign domination in some parts or in the totality of its territory for the next 450 years, but the nationalist spirit didn’t die. For the Sinhalese, independence from the British in 1948 meant a restoration of their long lost national sovereignty over the country. This independence, they thought, was however not only for them; it was also for the minorities who were their partners in nation building. But the minority groups (or more correctly certain members of the elite who claimed to represent them, although they , like their counterparts in the majority race, were alienated from their own people) were not too ready to appreciate or willing to accommodate these sentiments, calling into question the trustworthiness of Sinhalese politicians in the matter of sharing political power equitably after independence from the British.



Although the dominant group of pioneer national leaders who came from all communities did not put a premium on internecine racial divisions, hoping to forge one multiethnic ‘Ceylonese national identity’ in the earlier stages of the independence movement, ethnic tensions started coming to the fore when a trend towards the achievement of self-rule emerged in the first half of the 20th century. This was mainly due (not unlike the situation today) to the wrong interpretation of Sinhalese Buddhist political ideals which were not properly articulated or understood by the local politicians who came almost exclusively from the privileged westernized elite. Even those among them who were sympathetic to Sinhalese nationalist sentiments believed that these would divide the ‘Ceylonese’, and hence chose to ignore them while focusing on what they considered ‘ more urgent matters’.



To go back a little in history, after the amalagamation of the Kandyan kingdom with the rest of the island in 1815 the British started consolidating their rule. They introduced occasional reforms, which were primarily meant to establish an efficient trouble-free imperial administration, and only secondarily to promote the welfare of the subjects. The first Legislative Council (1833) consisted of six unofficial members nominated by the Governor – one member to represent the Sinhalese, one for the Tamils, and four for Europeans. This lasted for the next seventy-five years, until in 1909 in response to revived agitation for constitutional reforms, the number of the unofficial members was raised to eight – three for Europeans, two for Sinhalese, one for Tamils, one for Burghers, and one for the Muslims (Think of the ‘improved’ communal balance in the Legislative Council, ignoring the fact of its powerlessness to influence government policy in actual practice: three for European interests, three for minorities, and only two for the Sinhalese!)



Although the membership of the Legislative Council allowed little participation in actually determining or influencing government policy, the deliberate imbalance in racial representation that it embodied showed the more favoured position of the minorities as opposed to the majority Sinhalese. The imperialists preyed on the country, and left the scavenging job to others, including the comprador class (the elite formed of members from all the communities).



Any move towards redressing this anomaly was met with apprehension by the minorities. However, as a result of joint demands made by the Ceylon National Association based in Colombo and the Jaffna Association, the Manning Reforms of the early 1920’s introduced a form of territorial (instead of communal) representation, which enlarged the Legislative Council giving the Sinhalese a decisive edge over the minorities in the legislature.



The fears and suspicions of the minorities aggravated when the Ceylon National Congress of Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam began pressing for self government, because the minorities concluded that if the demand for self-government was granted, then an excessively powerful Sinhalese majority would be ensconced in a position of perpetual domination over them. Attempts to allay these fears, such as the proposal to allocate a special seat for Tamils of the Western Province (where there was a concentration of them engaged in official and business activity), actually worsened the disagreements. Eventually, Tamils under the Jaffna Association left the Ceylon National Congress despite the concerted efforts of leaders like D.S. Senanayake, A. Mahadea and F.Molamure to stop their withdrawal.



When the Donoughmore Commissioners who arrived in the island in the late 1920’s offered universal suffrage based on territorial representation, Tamils opposed it arguing that this would give the Sinhalese majority an advantage over the minorities. But the Commissioners went ahead with their reforms. The Legislative Council was replaced with a State Council. The first State Council elections under the Donoughmore Constitution were held in June 1931. The Jaffna Tamils in general boycotted the polls, but later gave up the boycott, and got elected to the State Council in fresh elections in 1934. The price that they had to pay for the initial boycott was that they forfeited their chance of joining the Board of Ministers. The State Council experience provided Mr D.S. Senanayake with an opportunity to show his abilities as an efficient manager. He was a committed nationalist opposed to colonialism, communism, and communalism, and firmly believed in, and worked with dedication for, the ideal of a multiethnic united Ceylonese nation.



But some Tamil politicians thought that the Sinhalese majority would not allow the special privileges they had enjoyed under the British to continue, and wanted to somehow check what they considered the emerging Sinhalese majoritarian ascendancy. Mr G.G.Ponnambalam came out with his outrageous 50-50 proposition in the early 1940’s when the Soulbury Constitution for an independent Ceylon was being mooted : that is, fifty seats in the legislature for the majority, and fifty for the minorities, and also the ministerial positions to be allocated on the same basis! Simply, this would have violated the very basic democratic principle of equality, because, the minorities being only about 20% , and the majority Sinhalese 80%, it would mean that one member of a minority was equivalent to four Sinhalese! Yet the Sinhalese are still condemned as communalists.



Mr D.S. Senanayake did not approve of Mr S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Maha Sabha of 1937 for obvious reasons, though it could be seen as a parallel development to the communal line of the minorities that gradually became marked in the decades preceding independence.



Had the minority leaders, especially the Tamils, and certain less wise Sinhalese politicians acted in the broadminded, democratic, statesmanlike , non-racialist way that Mr D.S. Senanayake did in responding to the progressive reforms towards self-rule gradually exacted from the British colonial administration over a period of more than one hundred years from 1833 to 1948, an achievement made by the sincere efforts of a galaxy of patriotic freedom fighters from all communities, seeds of division between the majority and the minorities would not have been sown, and the country would not have been condemned to taste the bitter poisonous fruits of communal politics that we are reaping today.







Rohana R. Wasala

The Uniqueness of Human Language

Previously published in the Midweek Review, The Island of Wednesday, 8^th April 2009

Although living in social groups is not unique to humans, among the myriad forms of animal life on earth only the human species can be said to have undergone the evolutionary process known as civilization. The term civilization refers to the general social development of the human race over the millennia with steadily growing levels of knowledge, skills, mastery of natural forces through science and technology, commerce, government, art, religion, etc. In the final analysis, this never-ending activity is based on the creation, dissemination, refinement, preservation, and transmission down the ages, of ideas. But for language none of these would have been achieved by the humankind. And language itself is a concomitant of the exceptionally advanced brain power of the humans.

What language (especially human language) itself is strikes me as a daunting thing to form an idea of, and I, with my essentially limited knowledge, will not presume to attempt a definition of it in this essay or most likely anywhere else. However, there is hardly any difficulty in identifying human language when we come across an example of it. It is a thing we cannot afford to ignore; it is as common and as precious (nevertheless) in the human intellectual domain as the air we breathe in our physical environment. I will be content here to point to certain characteristics of human language in support of the thesis of my essay – the species-specificity of human language (i.e. language being a distinguishing characteristic of the human species).

Extensive research done over the past eighty years or so into the capacity of animals to learn human language seems to have drawn a blank except for the demonstration of some intelligent apes’ potential to deal with the “barest rudiments of language”. (Noam Chomsky denied even this rudimentary linguistic capacity for animals.)

It was in the 1930’s that two scientists, Luella and Winthrop Kellog, raised an infant chimpanzee called Gua together with their baby son. It was reported that Gua could understand about a hundred words, but did not articulate any of them. Another chimpanzee, Viki, in the 1940’s, brought up under similar conditions by another scientist couple (Catherine and Keith Hayes), after five years of training, was eventually able to produce rather poorly articulated versions of ‘mama’, ‘papa’, and ‘cup’. This, actually, is a noteworthy achievement in view of the fact that non-human primates’ vocal tracts are not physically structured for producing human speech sounds.

In 1966 Beatrix and Allen Gardner, recognizing that chimpanzees are not physically equipped for producing human speech, started teaching a chimpanzee which they named Washoe a version of American Sign Language (ASL). ASL has all the distinctive features of human language. Three and a half years of training gave Washoe the ability to use signs for more than a hundred words including ‘airplane’, ‘baby’, ‘window’ and you’. She was even able to combine some of these to produce sentences of the kind ‘more fruit’, ‘open fruit drink’, which demonstrated some inchoate linguistic productivity. Some of these forms appeared to be her own inventions, eg., ‘water bird’ for ‘swan’. It was seen that she could understand many more signs than she could produce. Washoe was said to be capable of having rudimentary conversations mainly of the question-answer type.

About the same time, Ann and David Premack experimented with a chimpanzee called Sarah. She was taught to manipulate a set of shapes for communicating with humans. The shapes represented words. These could be arranged into ‘sentences’. Sarah was trained to link these shapes to objects or actions. After learning to use a large number of these plastic shapes, she was able to select a blue triangle to get an apple. There is no natural connection between a blue plastic triangle and an apple. Therefore this symbol was arbitrary. Sarah was able to make such sentences as ‘Mary give chocolate Sarah’.

In 1973, Duane and Sue Rumbaugh subjected three chimpanzees (Lana, Sherman, and Austin) to a training technique with a similar artificial language, which they called Yerkish. A set of symbols on a large keyboard linked to a computer was available for Lana and others to manipulate. For example, they had to press four symbols in the correct order to produce the message ‘Please machine give water’.

However, many greeted these claims with skepticism. They argued that Lana and the other chimpanzees used the word ‘please’ without understanding its meaning. The chimpanzees did not know that they could produce a meaningful utterance by omitting ‘please’. The sign for ‘please’ was merely the equivalent of a button on a vending machine; the ability to use it did not need any language knowledge.

It was the psychologist Herbert Terrace who produced the most convincing arguments against claims of chimpanzees’ linguistic achievements. He used a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky (a deliberate play on the name of Noam Chomsky, who had asserted that language is an innate ability unique to the human species). This experiment began in 1973.

Nim was taught American Sign Language under controlled conditions. Nim’s classroom activities were carefully recorded and videotaped. He, like Washoe before him, seemed to be developing a linguistic ability much like human children. However, close inspection of the videotapes showed that this impression was wrong: Nim was not actually capable of synthesizing more complex structures out of simpler ones in the way that human children do besides, Nim responded to his teachers’ signing, but rarely initiated any signing by himself. This observation led Terrace to reinvestigate the video records of Washoe’s use of sign language. He argued that both Nim and Washoe only appeared to use signs as language. Terrace concluded that these chimpanzees were clever animals which produced a certain kind of behaviour (signing) in order to be rewarded; their signing was not linguistic at all.

It may appear that animal communication and human communication have certain features in common. Both animals and humans use ‘signs’, either visual or vocal to communicate. For example, bees are known to pass on information about available sources of nectar to their colleagues through a kind of dance, while we choose to convey some information solely through gestures in certain situations without using language at all. However, since language is basically dependent on the manipulation of vocal symbols, it would be relevant here to consider how linguistically close animal communication could be to human communication in terms of ‘articulated’ sounds.

One feature common for both animals and humans is the use of the vocal- auditory channel. Human language is typically generated through the vocal organs and perceived through the ears , but it can also be transmitted without sound, through writing or visual signs. Many other species (eg. monkeys, elephants, dolphins, birds)use the vocal-auditory channel. Another common element is reciprocity (i.e. the sender of a signal can also be the receiver of a similar signal). A third shared feature is specialization, which means that linguistic signals do not serve any other purpose such as breathing. A fourth is that for both humans and animals vocal signals are non-directional (linguistic signals can be picked up by any individual within hearing range). Finally, rapid fade characterizes vocal signals, whether animal or human, which means that these disappear as soon as they are produced. Thus, in certain merely ‘mechanical’ ways animal vocal communication and human language show some close resemblance.

On the other hand, there are infinitely more significant features which are almost entirely unique to human language, while being only vestigially present in animal communication. These characteristics are connected with man’s uniquely advanced ability to think, which is impossible without language.

A human can talk not only about what is present to his or her senses at the time of speaking, but also about things which are yet to happen, or happened in the past, or are merely imagined. This property of human language is known as displacement. Displacement is generally absent in animal communication. Bees are able to indicate sources of food to other worker bees by means of a dance. This may suggest that bee communication has the quality of displacement, but the important thing is that this is extremely limited. Bees, for example, cannot refer to ‘the garden we visited yesterday’.

The second distinctive quality of human language is arbitrariness. That is, there is no natural connection between a linguistic form and its meaning. The English word ‘dog’ has no intrinsic relationship with the animal it denotes. The onomatopoeic theory of language origin may seem to contradict this: words such as boom, clash, crash, cuckoo, and slurp suggest by their sound the objects or activities they name. The truth is that such onomatopoeic words are actually not numerous enough to account for the infinitely vast and complex phenomenon of language.

In the case of animal communication there is a clear relationship between one sound and its intended message. Squirrels, for instance, have one call for mating, one for sharing food, one for warning of danger, etc., (and it is my personal experience that they have a special call to signal the presence of a snake in the vicinity). Arbitrariness, therefore, is not present in animal communication; but it is a distinctive quality of human speech.

The next characteristic feature of all human languages is that new sentences are made all the time. Children who are learning a language make sentences which they have never heard before; adults also do the same in dealing with novel ideas and new situations. This property of productivity is not shared by non-human signifying systems. Vervet monkeys are said to have thirty-six vocal calls, and cicadas only four. These sets of signals are fixed in range. Animals do not produce new signals or combinations of signals for new experiences or events. They have fixed reference (that is, each signal is specific to a particular object or occasion).

Cultural transmission is the way human language is passed on from one generation to the next. Although babies possess an innate capacity for language, they do not genetically inherit their parents’ language. What they acquire is the language that they are exposed to. On the other hand, a dog, for instance, need not necessarily listen to its parents’ barking before it can do the same. The signals used for animal communication are not usually culturally transmitted. In their case, transmission is biological.. Animals do not learn their communication systems; they acquire them instinctively.

Human linguistic sounds are discrete, i.e. they are meaningfully distinct. For example, the sounds represented by the letters f and v in English are not very different from each other, but the use of one rather than the other in a word is meaningful, eg. fine/vine, fat/vat. The calls of animals cannot be analysed into such discrete units that can recur in other combinations.

Yet another distinguishing property of human language is its duality, which means that it is organized at two levels simultaneously. At one level we can produce the individual sounds such as a, p, and t. They have no specific meaning. We can also produce these sounds in a particular combination (eg. apt, tap, pat), which is meaningful. This means that at one level of articulation we have distinct sounds, and at the other distinct meanings. This feature, known as duality or double articulation, makes it possible for us to produce a very large number of sound combinations using a limited set of distinct sounds. A dog’s ‘woof’ cannot be shown to be the combination of three distinct sounds w, oo, and f; neither can a dog be said to put these sounds in different patterns to convey different meanings. Animal communication, therefore, does not demonstrate duality.

The most distinctive feature of human language is that it is rule-governed (structured). When children learn a language, they invariably learn its grammar. The grammar of a language comprises its phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules, along with its vocabulary. The remarkable thing is that no one teaches them these; they just ‘pick them up’. For example, a child who is acquiring English as his or her mother tongue will learn the process of sentence construction, notions of tenses, forming questions, transformations, nominalizations and other complex manoeuvres without overt teaching. This crucial grammar-based nature of human language is not even minimally present in animal communication. No animal signifying system can achieve the infinite productivity and complexity of human language.

The human being is the most ‘dominant’ creature on earth and the only ‘civilized’ one. Among animals, the humans govern the earth and have already attained enough scientific knowledge and technological expertise to make their presence felt even beyond the solar system if there are any other similarly advanced intelligent beings out there in our celestial neighbourhood! All this has been possible thanks to the humans’ unique intellectual capacity, which goes hand in hand with language.

Advanced rational thinking is probably the most characteristic activity that sets the humans apart from other animals, though there are many instances of animal behaviour that demonstrate something like rational thought (My dog Ralph, a Doberman pinscher, leaves me in no about this). Human thinking is done through language, and would be impossible without it. Language is the means by which human beings assimilate existing knowledge, create new knowledge, disseminate it to their fellow humans, preserve it , and pass it on to posterity. Human beings experience their world, and live their lives through language to an extent inconceivable in the case of animals. True, animals have their own communication systems, but these are narrowly geared to their biological need of survival.

The universal ability that human babies are equipped with to acquire any particular language gradually in a relatively short period of time without being subjected to a course of instruction, but through mere exposure to it, and the extremely limited results of animal language research show that human language is a biologically determined innate faculty specific to the human species. So, neither the many instances of animal communication that we commonly observe nor the scientists’ attempts to train animals to speak or use language like human beings can be said to provide enough evidence for us to challenge the claim that language is a unique human possession.

Rohana R. Wasala

The Problem of Writing Textbooks for ELT

Previously published in The Island on Wednesday 4, June 2008

I write the following in the national interest as a parent and an educationist with a view to drawing the attention of those concerned to a vital issue in the relevant field. No criticism of individuals or a particular institution is intended. Contrary opinions are welcome.

Instructional materials play a vital role in any language teaching system. They contribute to the organizational aspect of a method or approach along with five other elements in terms of the model of methodological analysis elaborated by Richards and Rodgers in their book Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (2001. 2^nd ed.Cambridge University Press): the general and specific objectives of the particular method or approach, a syllabus model, types of learning and teaching activities, learner roles, and teacher roles.

The role of instructional materials is determined by the primary goal envisaged for them by the designers of the relevant language teaching programme (e.g. to present content, that is, the language items to be taught; practice content; to facilitate interactive communication between learners; or to enable learners to practice content unaided by the teacher, and so on). In fact, a particular design for an instructional system allocates a set of roles to materials. Basically they are meant to support the syllabus, the teacher, and the learners. The syllabus specifies the content choice and organization, that is, selection of language items, and their sequencing and gradation respectively. The instructional materials elaborate these further.

In a functional communicative language teaching context instructional materials are chosen on the basis of their efficacy in promoting interactive communication through the target language among the learners, the operative principle being one of ‘using the language to learn it’ (and not the other around).

Among the wide variety of language teaching materials three types may be described as especially important in such a context: text-based materials (i.e. textbooks generally), task-based materials (e.g. problem-solving tasks, role plays, games, etc.), and realia (things from real life such as real objects, newspaper articles, magazines, maps, posters, advertisements, etc.). All three types are important for the success of a formalized, uniform instructional system like the state English language teaching programme. Of these, however, I feel, textbooks are the most important type of materials since they are evidently the mainstay of the school English language teaching project of Sri Lanka’s Department of Education .

It would not be realistic to expect a textbook, however well made it may be, to fulfill all the various needs in any given language classroom. However, though perfection is not probable, nor even possible, in this matter of coursebook preparation, attempts at such a goal will always pay dividends. As far as Sri Lanka is concerned a drive towards the production of good textbooks for teaching English can receive an impetus from the circumstance indicated in the following paragraph..

In his ‘Language Teaching Methodology’ (1991. Prentice Hall International (UK) Ltd. p. 209) David Nunan refers to the burdensome nature of the creation of materials in foreign language teaching contexts (as opposed to second language teaching contexts) due to the non-availability of authentic source and stimulus material. We enjoy the advantage implied here (i.e. that of an abundance of source and stimulus material) because our English teaching programme is essentially a second language teaching one.

I am not here talking about English medium instruction. My focus is on the teaching of English as a second language, which undoubtedly concerns the interests of the largest proportion of the student population of the country as a whole. A good way to ensure democratic egalitarianism and also to meet the demand for fiscal accountability in the country’s education system is obviously to do everything possible to make a success of teaching English as a second language, not to concentrate too much on a return of the English medium. Bilingualism (i.e., proficiency in English, plus Sinhala or Tamil in our case) rather than monolingualism in English or in one of the native languages, should be our national goal. Only such a policy will allow the general student population (comprising mainly the rural poor) to benefit from a knowledge of English, while enjoying their birthright of receiving an education in their own native language.

(A word about the oft-asserted link between proficiency in English and employability: the truth, I think, is that, in the current scheme of things, it is not a matter of English alone; it’s a problem of English plus ‘class’! Many employers would prefer to employ a person from the ‘elite’ with a smattering of English rather than another from a less privileged section of the society with an excellent command of the language. This, of course, is a serious issue that must be dealt with separately.)

Emphasis on English as a second language, instead of English as the medium of education, will serve two very important ends among others: for one thing, it will save the indigenous languages from the threat of extinction in the face of the dominance exercised by English; for another, it will provide a universally available key to the ever expanding storehouse of human knowledge and culture at the present time, obviating the danger of a constricting insularity among the young.

A second language is a language a person acquires in order to serve some communicative purpose after they have learnt their mother tongue or first language. One’s mother tongue need not necessarily be one’s first language; a person born to Sinhala speaking parents, or growing up as a baby in a Sinhala speaking environment will learn Sinhala as their mother tongue, and later continue to use it as their first language, i.e. the language in which they normally function in education, work, general communication, travel, etc.; in this case Sinhala assumes the roles of that person’s mother tongue, and first language, in other words, their mother tongue and first language are identical; one can also adopt another language than one’s mother tongue as one’s first language, as some Sri Lankans whose mother tongue is either Sinhala or Tamil do by choosing to use English to function in the normal spheres of activity. But we use the description second language to refer to English in a situation where it is available to a person as an additional language in which they can operate in.

We have a substantial number of people who have opted to use English as their first language, though their mother tongue is one of the native languages. Yet the vast majority of us who have acquired a knowledge of English use it as a second language, which means that many of us enjoy the privilege of choosing between our own native tongue and English as our first language in specific situations. (This could confuse the reader a little. There won’t be any confusion if we grasp the point that labels such as mother tongue, first language, second language, and many other similar epithets cannot be permanently fixed to any particular language; the badge only refers to the way any language is used in a particular situation; it is like the same man changing his identity as son, brother, husband, father, or grandfather in relation to different members of his family.)

For a relatively small number of Sri Lankan citizens English is their native/mother tongue; for many more it is their first language. However, for the largest number of Sri Lankans who have anything to do with English it is a second language. Therefore the state English language teaching programme must be geared (as it already is) to teaching the language as a second language for it to be relevant to the widest national interest.

The successful running of the second language teaching programme is, as is well known, hampered by the paucity of resources, especially in the suburban and rural schools, which account for over 90% of the 10,000 strong school system. There are dedicated English teachers with a very good knowledge of their subject and an excellent professional record. Unfortunately, the Department of Education doesn’t have enough of them. The majority of the teachers are poorly trained, and possess only a low level of proficiency in English. Audiovisuals (pictures, charts, maps, audio- and video- players, OHP’s, etc) are not uniformly available in the majority of schools. Technological innovations such as computer software and internet facilities are an absolute rarity. This lack of resources, both human and material, precludes the creation of the basic classroom environment that is essential for stimulating communicative language use among the learners of English.

In this state of resource scarcity the most generally available instructional material is the English textbook. The textbooks are required to compensate for the poor quality of teachers and also for the shortage of other resources. The English textbooks are required to perform a teacher education function, in addition to its more central function of promoting language learning among the students through its communicative use. Much, therefore, is naturally expected of the English textbooks that are produced for use in schools. And ensuring that they maintain a high enough level of excellence is of great concern for educationists, and the general public.

If the English textbooks are to serve the expected ends they must meet a number of criteria ( which, incidentally, are applicable to other instructional materials as well). And these criteria are based on the very fundamental assumption that the textbooks will be efficient tools in the hands of teachers and learners only in so far as they carry a high potential of promoting creative interaction between them, and of triggering, in the process, plenty of communicative language use in the English language classroom and outside of it.

First, they must be based on a thorough knowledge of the students for whom they are meant, an empathetic understanding of their social and cultural background, their emotional and educational needs and expectations, a grasp of their attitude to the task of learning English, and an appreciation of their vision of what they could achieve by a mastery of English as a second language. The employment of mostly local textbook writers (and probably others with a similar outlook on the local scene) may be seen as an attempt to fulfill this need.

A good textbook does not neglect the affective side of the teaching-learning process. It, along with other instructional materials, contributes towards the creation of a safe, friendly and cooperative learning environment that is conducive to meaningful interaction among the learners through the communicative use of the target language. The various language practice activities are of the kind that generates confidence in the learners, and a relaxed classroom atmosphere.

It would be so compiled that the explicit focus would be on the content or subject-matter of each unit, that is, information about some topic that generally appeals to the students; the language that is being presented becomes almost an unnoticed tool in their collaborative interaction or engagement with the text. The various tasks set engage the learners’ creativity; they give the students a legitimate reason to use the language they are learning. Such a textbook provides for the use of audiovisuals and realia for eliciting language from the students.

This kind of creative response from the teachers and students can be expected only if the textbook is based on a consistent ideology or philosophy of teaching and learning, as well as a clear view of the nature of human language. Every activity that is designed, every decision that is implied regarding the selection, sequencing, and gradation, and the intensity of coverage of language items, should be explainable in terms of this rationale.

Yet another criterion that should be observed in the production of a textbook is to ensure that the activities designed integrate all the four major language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and that they cater for all cognitive strategies, i.e. those that involve thinking, or knowing (strategies that, for example, enable the students to understand the rules of grammar implicit in a piece of language); the activities set need to involve problem-solving, and reflection (careful thought) using the target language.

Since the main purpose of a language teaching textbook is to bring about sufficient practice in the communicative use of the relevant language, the linguistic ‘input’ ( the language that is presented by the teacher) and the ‘output’ (the language that is produced by the learners) ‘should be correct, natural and standard’ in terms of the core elements of currently accepted global usage.

The same principle of accuracy applies to the cultural information provided about Sri Lanka, and other countries where English is used. Evidently this cultural aspect is more complex today than it was in the past. Before the emergence of English as a widespread international language and the advent of communicative language teaching it was usually considered necessary for foreign learners of English to be familiar with the culture of the native users of the language, i.e. particularly, the British and the Americans. But today in many countries around the world those who want to learn English are required not only to experience their own native cultures, but also to comprehend a composite ‘world’ culture through English, as members of one global linguistic community (the majority using it as a second language).

But it is good to remember that our ideologies regarding teaching and learning English are still, more or less, dominated by western attitudes. Developing theories and practices that amalgamate better with the truly liberal, cosmopolitan, humane, age-old local culture (which is traditionally misunderstood and misrepresented by the culturally uprooted few who choose to believe that English is still their exclusive patrimony) is a necessity that is yet to be addressed. Our choice of materials, the ways they are presented and practiced, assumptions about what is culturally acceptable, for example, in the matter of student-teacher relationships, ideas about the importance of a knowledge of English among the students, their parents, and the general public – all these are interrelated, and need to be recognized as such.

Having said this, however, it is my conviction that ultimately there is an essential condition that must be fulfilled for the successful and efficient learning of a language (as stated earlier): an abundance of meaningful use of the target language both in the classroom and outside it, accompanied by a steady development of the learners’ cognitive abilities. And the textbooks that are intended to be the mainspring of the whole machinery of the English language teaching programme must be composed of material that provides for that kind of language use catering to an essentially varied population of learners.

Students differ in their interests, levels of motivation, rates of progress, and attitudes towards learning English. Usually teachers are asked to teach mixed-ability groups. A textbook must give them (teachers) sufficient flexibility to deal with these differences. The subject-matter content and the activities based on them should appeal to a variety of students. The difficulty level of the tasks should be so varied as to allow even the weakest students to tackle at least some of them with confidence; but the general level of difficulty should be slightly above the level of achievement expected of any particular (school) grade.

Creation of textbook materials is a very exacting job, to say the least, with so many complicated issues to be looked into. This is easier said than done. Yes, it is difficult, but not impossible.

The textbooks that we need had better be authored by local specialists (or foreigners with comparable empathy with, and understanding of, the Sri Lankan community) in view of the pragmatic assumption that meaningful use of the target language is the surest way to learn a language. Using English for meaningful communication refers to the process by which the learners perceive, interpret and construct their own typical experiences through English.

There were in the past very competent writers of English language teaching textbooks. Mr W.H.Samaranayake was one of the best. His ‘English with a Smile’ series written around the time of Independence was wonderfully responsive to the contemporary political and social transition that was sweeping the country. For this reason his textbooks were far superior (for Sri Lanka) to the adapted versions of foreign textbooks normally used at that time. And, in fact, nothing as good has been produced to date since textbook-writing was ‘indigenized’ in the late sixties. (Obviously, Samaranayake’s books would not stand comparison with the best modern ELT textbooks that someone of the present generation might produce; they are excellent in terms of traditional principles of textbook writing obtaining at that time, and they demonstrate the high levels of creativity achievable in that endeavour in the changed local context today.)

True, Mr Samaranayake was much less encumbered by the mass of bewilderingly complicated and convoluted theories about language, and language pedagogy, among numerous other issues that textbook compilers must contend with nowadays. But, as a textbook writer he was not totally free from challenges. One such challenge was to make English intelligible to students from outside the privileged classes. He met those challenges successfully. There is no doubt that he kept abreast of contemporary trends and developments in the field of language teaching. He was a master of the English language, and he knew his students and his country. He made use of good specimens of writing from native and foreign authors dealing with Sri Lankan themes, which made his books appealing to the students they were intended for. Mr Samaranayake’s books were, and still are, eminently teachable, too. The ‘English with a Smile’ series, though outside the official textbook system, is popular even today in this country.

At the time Mr Samaranayake created his English textbooks the ‘reproduction’ view of language learning (i.e. rote learning) had not yet been seriously challenged, and the more creative view of language learning as ‘problem-solving’ was still a few decades ahead in the future. Yet, the language tasks he devised were imaginative enough to engage the students’ thinking power.

Of course, I am not advocating a return to ‘English with a Smile’. But it would be useful to appreciate why the series has become a classic in textbook writing history.

I wonder whether at least a few of the English textbooks used in Sri Lankan schools today could claim such a high level of excellence (as Mr Samaranayake’s) as teaching materials. This is something worth investigating for reasons that need not be reiterated.

Rohana R. Wasala