29th June 1997

Ensuring Free Education while promoting Excellence and choice

Waiting for radical reform

There is a general per ception that the Sri Lankan education system is in need of radical reform. Almost every day the papers carry reports of speeches by the President, the Minister for Education, the Minister for Higher Education, all talking about essential changes that are imminent. A special task force has been set up for this purpose, following on the revitalization of the National Education Commission.

Going by experience however, it would only be an incurable optimist who would assume that anything positive would be achieved. We have after all had great excitement about educational reform before. Lots of what purported to be radical changes have been implemented, and the system has only got worse.

Of course, it would be nice to think that this time things will be different. But from what has been seen so far, the chances of this particular government implementing coherent changes in the field of education is unlikely. After all the personnel placed in positions of authority are almost exactly the same as those appointed by the previous government. Even the head of the special task force is the Civil Servant hand-picked by Ranil Wickremesinghe to be Secretary of the Ministry of Education over fifteen years ago.

But, that the PA government does not seem to have any ideas of its own as regards education is not perhaps of its own a reason to be upset. Indeed, one should perhaps be thankful that it did not attempt to implement ideas in terms of the ruling ideology of most of its constituents. In that respect one has to pay some tribute to Mrs. Kumaratunga who having established her authority in the SLFP as the standard bearer of its left wing, has by sheer force of personality dragged her party towards a political outlook more in accord with the closing years of the 20th century.

But she had to pay a price for this. And it is immeasurably sad that the price was paid most prominently with regard to education, which is the single most important area in which concerted action could contribute to development.

But it is now almost forgotten that, in the days in which Mrs. Kumaratunga was gearing herself for power, she had a think-tank in which, even more perhaps than by Prof. Pieris, the conceptual input was provided by Mr. Lal Jayawardene. Gossip at the time was that he would be on the National List, and would be made a Minister. But alas he spoke too soon. He suggested that some sort of private sector input was essential in education.

And the wolves fell upon him. Reading the criticism of his position that were published even in the English language press at the time, one realized the status of this particular sacred cow.

Characteristic was an article by the Dean of the only Faculty of Education in the country claiming that the state system was deficient only because not all schools had been nationalized. Amidst all sorts of protests, it was indicated that Mr. Jayewardene would not be given a position of prominence; and as is the fate of all advisers in this country who do not possess a prominent position, his input into social restructuring has been minimal since.

And that has been tragic, because it is clear that someone of Mr. Jayawardene’s stature was essential if the conceptual changes required were to be even contemplated. Instead what is supposed to be reform on behalf of those who suffer has once more been transformed by the politics of envy.

What was for instance recently highlighted of the activities of the National Education Commission (NEC) was not its plans, and some of them are certainly very promising in concept for the vast majority of children in this country, but the formulation of policy regarding international schools. And quite predictably what was stressed was the enforcement of conformity with regard to a curriculum.

But what right has the government to dictate policy regarding International Schools? We have moved from the days of statist socialism when no one questioned the right of the government to dictate every thing.

Does Mrs. Kumaratunga seriously believe that anyone should have the right to stop her sending her children to the Colombo International School (CIS), or even that bureaucrats with no responsibility for that school should dictate what her children are taught?

If so many policy makers, Mr. Premadasa and Mr. Lokubandara, Ms. Athulath-mudali and Ms. Kumaratunga, have sent their children to such schools, surely it is the business of the government instead to find out why its own schools have been spurned? And if the argument is, CIS is wonderful but we need to introduce regulations to ensure that all the others, those in Matale and Ratnapura and Kalmunai, are as good, surely the first responsibility of the government is to find out why parents in these areas choose to send their children to expensive schools instead of to free schools for which the government is responsible.

Instead of trying, just because it is different; to interfere with what people want, the government should look at what is inadequate about its own curriculum and structure and introduce more of what people want into its own system.

That what the government has built up is appalling is clear, not only from the pronouncements noted above, but also from simple statistics, failure rates in maths and science and English, the continuing need to have District quotas to make up for bad schooling in so many areas, the absenteeism amongst teachers that Mrs. Kumaratunga highlighted, the tiny proportion of those who qualify who are able to have a university education, the long time it takes to receive such an education, etc., And yet the assumption seems to be that it is those bureaucrats who have presided over such a mess who have the right to continue to dictate universally.

Hayek has made it abundantly clear that entrusting decisions in such areas to the state is absurd. In the Sri Lankan situation the argument is even stronger, for the attendance of the children of the great at International Schools makes it clear that even the great do not believe in the straitjacket they have imposed; and the number of bureaucrats whose children are at university abroad makes even clearer the callousness of those who are unwilling to open opportunities in this country for those not as fortunate as themselves.

The argument that has prevailed so far is that allowing for private sector participation in education will be at the expense of the underprivileged. This argument received an unfortunate fillip due to the antics of the Jayewardene government which claimed to set up a Private Medical College, on which it expended state resources, and which was in fact initially seen as a haven for the children of bureaucrats and decision makers left out by the state system.

But that little escapade in a sense highlighted the problems with privatization that any sensible government committed to improving the lot of all its people could have avoided. The main objection of the radical left at the time, it will be recalled, was to the government decision that NCMC students would be given a Colombo University degree and treated on par with regard to government jobs.

The simple fact was that, under the guise of privatization, the Jayewardene government, typically, created yet another institution to control, and used state resources in an underhand way to achieve this.

A programme of privatization in education has to begin on the assumption that it will supplement and support the state sector, not supplant it. No one, not even the most extreme conservative, now questions that it is the duty of the state to ensure that everyone receives an education upto a certain level, and that no one who qualifies for higher level education should be deprived of it because of a personal lack of resources. Unfortunately in Sri Lanka, almost uniquely amongst societies not wholly closed, this has been translated into meaning that it is the duty of the state to prevent anyone receiving an education different from that of others, and that higher level education should be restricted by all the constraints that a centralized state, itself subject to financial, political and social limitations, can impose.

In advocating a radical shift in the Sri Lankan system, I do not for a moment suggest that all students, or parents, should be made to pay for tertiary education. Good tertiary education is a necessity for a developing country, and the state should ensure that no one who is fit for it, academically or vocationally, is deprived through lack of resources. Yet in order to maximize opportunity for the deprived, it is desirable to make use of the resources of those who possess them. Even more urgently, to prevent wastage, there should be checks on the resources expended so as to ensure productivity.

Thus students should be given grants for fixed periods dependent on results; while the universities themselves should, if they use state resources abide by regular calendars so that education is not disrupted. The recent strikes made clear the wastefulness of a system that leaves everything to be centrally decided, so that pressure on any one part of the system means that the whole is affected.

Instead of relying on the pattern of higher education in other eastern countries as well as in the west, this country should develop a programme of diversification and decentralization. State resources may be allocated to universities but they should then use them independently but accountably.

At present accountability has been reduced to audit queries which contribute nothing to policies or productivity. Instead the UGC or whatever body that governs allocation of funds should draw up a series of efficiency measures and should monitor these carefully, and reduce or increase funds each year in accordance with whether students are being educated satisfactorily. The measures should make reference to employer satisfaction, staff/student ratios (including ratios of administrative staff), productivity in other areas etc.

Meanwhile all institutions should be encouraged to seek additional funds for development and provinces should be able to establish their own institutions if they obtain adequate funding. Ideally the admissions system to all universities should be decentralized, with the UGC simply providing guidelines in accordance with which it would provide funding.

The present system with regard to courses considered especially desirable is immensely wasteful, given the number of students who make several attempts at examinations, the time lost in strikes largely related to outside issues and the varying levels of students taken in. Instead, on the American model, more universities could provide foundation level courses to many more students, who would be selectively taken into more complex areas of study depending on their earlier showing.

What is needed, at all levels, from primary schools to university and indeed at the level of continuing adult education, woefully neglected at present - is a change in attitude. That I am afraid is not likely if those responsible for the present situation continue to be left to simply tinker with it. But it is equally hopeless to set up new institutions that have to work through the old ones. This became quite clear when the reforms attempted by the National Institute of Education in its heyday were stymied by the need for coordination with and indeed implementation through the Ministry.

And now I can see the same thing happening to the apparently revitalized NEC, or to the Task Force which was finally set up only after intervention by the President. Meanwhile at the tertiary level a plea for change - I refer to Prof. Lakshman’s thoughtful article last week - concludes with the assumption that sacred cows cannot be touched.

But the premises he characterizes as ingrained have been ingrained only because the bureaucracy that benefits from them most has not allowed informed debate on the subject; and because in the refusal to think or innovate that characterizes that bureaucracy, the means that must always adjust to reality are confused with the goals that are self-evidently desirable.

Those goals include excellence and choice and equity, not an egalitarianism that in practice, and now alas in theory too, insists on levelling downwards.

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