Sunday Times 2
Education: A look back at the past
View(s):By Tissa Jayatilaka
On February 4, Sri Lanka reached 75 years since the end of the British colonial rule (1815-1948). It is as good a time as any to revisit some key issues that our country dealt with in the run-up to independence which have had a significant impact – for better or for worse – on our post-1948 destiny. Of these, I wish to pick education, a subject close to my heart.
The granting of universal adult franchise in 1931 under the Donoughmore Constitution whereby all Sri Lankan citizens over 21 years of age became eligible to vote, is a crucial landmark in modern Sri Lankan history. Another such landmark was the introduction of far-reaching educational reforms of 1945 of which the Educational Ordinance of 1939 was the forerunner. It was during the period when the late C.W.W. Kannangara held the education portfolio (1931-1947) in the State Council. Did the grant of the franchise which paved the way for electoral politics in Sri Lanka have a direct bearing on the introduction of these path-breaking educational reforms?
No easy road: Children walking to school during the fuel crisis (Pic by Sudath H.M. Hewa)
Kannangara appointed the Special Committee on Education in 1940 to look into the shortcomings of the existing educational system and recommend measures for reform. The Special Committee consisted of the members of the Executive Committee of Education and educational experts as were available in the country. (see The Road to Peradeniya An Autobiography by Sir Ivor Jennings, 2005). Much has been said and written about Kannangara’s role in formulating the path-breaking educational proposals of 1943 which were debated in that body in the latter half of 1944 when he moved a resolution on May 30, 1944, to the effect that these be adopted (see J.R. Jayewardene of Sri Lanka A Political Biography, Volume 1: The First Fifty Years by K.M. de Silva and Howard Wriggins). The board of ministers approved these proposals and placed them before the State Council on August 24, 1945.
Does Kannangara deserve all of the accolades paid him by his contemporaries and some of his die-hard loyalists of today? Whether Kannangara achieved greatness or had greatness thrust upon him, to my mind, is debatable. He was, as noted above, assisted by a 23-member Special Committee on Education. And yet Kannangara is identified as the person who, in 1945, introduced the free education scheme to Sri Lanka. Some academic historians, Professor J.E. Jayasuriya for one, attributed this honour to both Kannangara and A. Ratnayake (see Jayasuriya’s Educational Policies and Progress During British Rule 1796 – 1948) whilst K. Alvapillai who served as the secretary of the Executive Committee for Education from 1937 – 1943 singles out A. Ratnayake for this honour. He states:
The circumstances that weighed with the majority of the Committee in “plumping” for free education are interesting. The idea originated with that confirmed democrat A. Ratnayake (now President of the Senate) and he was strongly supported by the Chairman of the Committee (my emphasis). (see The Special Committee on Education, Chapter 53 in Part 11 of Education in Ceylon A Centenary Volume, 1969).
Thus it appears that Kannangara was more primus inter pares (a first among equals) than the sole originator of free education. The latter issue requires a longer discussion that is best left for a future date.
The key reforms among those proposed by the Special Committee on Education were:
a. The removal of tuition fees from the Kindergarten to University which came to be known officially as free education;
b. The introduction of swabasha as the medium of instruction in all schools in the country; and
c. The place of English in our national education system.
Any mention of these educational reforms must include a reference to the Central Schools Scheme, that is, the establishment of secondary schools in rural areas that offered the same education in the medium of English as found in urban secondary or denominational schools. There were 54 Central Schools in operation by 1944 and, while they functioned, they proved to be a stepping stone for rural children for social and economic advancement. Regrettably due to a lack of funds, the Central Schools Scheme could not be sustained.
A close look at the three key reforms stated above based on the views of those who participated in the deliberations of the Special Committee as also those of later critics of these reforms, bearing in mind that hindsight is always 20/20, begs the question – How free was free education even in 1945 and thereafter? Even as staunch a supporter of free education as Dr N.M. Perera (as any nationalist-socialist would have been in that era) was sceptical of the State Council securing the requisite funds needed for this ambitious scheme given the state of the economy at that time (see Dr N.M. Perera’s The Case for Free Education, he wrote while in Detention Prison in Kandy in 1944, for details).
Admittedly free education and swabasha were not bad concepts in and of themselves but were they, as formulated in the reforms, implementable? Were these ideas carefully evaluated by competent persons to determine if they could be successfully implemented given the social, political, and economic realities of the time? How much of a role, if any, did political expediency play in this matter?
Contrary to the fond expectations of those who advocated free education from the Kindergarten to the University, what actually materialised was something very different. Education, as J.E. Jayasuriya has pointed out, “was indeed free to all in theory but in practice what was free was a good education for the few and a bad education for the many”. What Jayasuriya says in Education in the Third World – Some Reflections (pp. 86-87) is worthy of quotation in full:
The immediate consequence of the principle of free education accepted in 1945 was to give a bonanza to the well-to-do by making available to them without payment the good education that had hitherto been paid for by them. The masses continued to receive free the poor quality education that had all along been free to them.
What were the consequences of the proposed changes in the language policy? In summary, the two significant observations were the following:
a. The determination of the mother tongue of a child is no easy task. As Sir Ivor Jennings has correctly pointed out, the mother tongue of a child is the language in which a mother spoke to her children, the language of the home. It is the language in which children would tend to express their most intimate thoughts however fluent they may become in other languages. The mother tongue issue proved to be, with the passage of time, another example of communalism. A Sinhalese was to be compelled to learn through Sinhalese, and a Tamil through Tamil. The fact that some Sinhalese spoke Tamil fluently and some Tamils spoke Sinhalese was ignored (see Sir Ivor Jennings’ The Road to Peradeniya An Autobiography,2005); and
b. Robert Marrs, the outgoing Principal of the University College, presciently observed that, “If English divided the privileged from the non-privileged, once English was dethroned there will now be two languages to divide the people.”
What of university education? How did the educational reforms of 1945 affect this sphere? The development of university education in Sri Lanka, as Professor C.R. de Silva has noted, may be conveniently divided into three stages. The first, from 1942-1959, was a period of planned progress. The years 1959 – 1965 were marked by chaos due mainly to “unplanned expansion”, especially in the Arts stream. From 1966 onwards, higher education in Sri Lanka was marred by government interference in the internal administration of the university. This situation was made worse by government efforts to enforce rigid control over university expenditure during a period of inflation.
The University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, originally designed to accommodate less than 2500 yet continued to have more than double the envisaged number. The efforts to provide accommodation for an additional intake of students, especially for the Arts Faculty, proved problematic. The university began to produce more and more Arts graduates finding employment for whom soon became an insurmountable problem. The seeming indifference of successive governments to the brewing crisis in the university resulted in a breakdown in administration and led in 1965, to a student strike, the first of what was to become a regular feature as the years went by. The degree of violence during these student disturbances also began to grow.
The Higher Education Act of 1966, which the then minister of education, Mr. I.M.R.A. Iriyagolla pushed through parliament was a major turning point in the history of university education in Sri Lanka. From around this time, the university came to be more and more affected by national politics. The Peradeniya campus of the university became a stronghold of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) which was far more intolerant of those with political views different from theirs. In addition, the JVP were far more inclined to resort to violence than any of their predecessors among student political groups. Given below in summary are some of the more violent acts committed by the JVP.
On 15 December 1986, Daya Pathirana, the president of the Independent Students’ Union of the University of Colombo was kidnapped and murdered.
On 3 March 1989, Prof. Stanley Wijesundere, vice chancellor (1979-1988) of the University of Colombo was shot dead in his office.
On 6 June 1989, the JVP’s student demonstrators at Peradeniya seized who they believed to be a group of security officers of the state dressed in civilian clothes, four men in a jeep. One escaped but the other three were battered to the point of death and killed later. A short while after this incident students at Sri Jayewardenepura University killed three men.
On 11 September 1989, Prof. C. Patuwatavithane, vice chancellor of the University of Moratuwa, was shot dead in his office, and the chief security officer of the university was killed with him.
On 4 October 1989, the adherents of the JVP killed a senior administrative official at the University of Peradeniya. (see K.M. de Silva’s The Sri Lankan Universities from 1977 to 1990; Recovery, Stability and the Descent to Crisis, for details).
The conclusion one is forced to arrive at is that, however well intentioned they may have been, the educational reforms of 1945 and their flawed implementation led to Sri Lanka’s higher education system, beginning in the mid-1960s onwards to a low that could not have been imagined possible in 1955. This descent, as noted above, was aided by political interference which made university administration a nightmare.
Instead of building on the educational foundation Sri Lanka had laid from Kindergarten to University, in the process of ushering in momentous changes without a sound prior assessment of the financial and administrative structure that was required to make the changes possible, Sri Lanka ended up making a bad system infinitely worse.
The change of the medium of instruction in schools without creating an enabling environment, led to raising the aspirations of the poor which the state could not meet. It also served to alienate the Sinhalese from the Tamils. The inability of the state to provide employment to the swabasha educated, mostly Arts graduates, who had no knowledge of English, bred deep frustration amongst the rural youth in particular. They were now, unlike earlier, “educated” but unemployable. The rapid expansion in university education, the lack of books and journals in Sinhala and Tamil for those proficient only in the vernacular languages and the woeful inability of the state to meet the needs for the promised teaching of English to all students from grade 3 onwards contributed to a volatile and disastrous mixture, the repercussions of which are to be felt to this day.
In sum, the achievement of the educational reforms of 1945, was to produce what has been called an “equality of degradation”. Because the poor had an inferior education, everybody had to have an inferior education. Because the poor had no access to English, everybody had to be deprived of that access.
(The writer is a former academic and academic administrator)