ROUND PEGS IN SQUARE HOLES

Goolbai Gunasekara lashes out at what ails Sri Lanka’s education system

Apart from wringing my hands at the sad state of education in this country, I no longer bother to try to find solutions or even slightly improve matters. My interests have so far been in the private education sector and most of my knowledge of government mismanagement has been gleaned from the media.

Such coverage is rarely praiseworthy unless it’s in the area of sport, art and drama competitions, debating etc. Actual educative practices in the outstations aren’t known to us in Colombo.

With the advent of AI, education is now becoming a great imponderable. Questions arise.

For instance, do the far away areas have adequate teachers?

We hear that many do not.

One reads of a school where the English teacher can barely speak the language. We see news items of children seated under umbrellas while rainwater leaks onto their desks through unrepaired roofs. We regularly read of principals and teachers sexually abusing students.

What is it really like for the children of plantation workers?

Recently, I learnt something about this from my maid who is herself a product of an estate school. She is literate and surprisingly up to date. I subscribe to a Tamil language Sunday newspaper for her, which she reads from cover to cover.

Ergo, she is able to hold an intelligent conversation with me on current affairs. And she has completed her O-Levels – and passed well.

She also likes novels. Tamil novels are only available in two shops in Pettah and Wellawatte. I live in Kotte so buying Tamil literature isn’t easy. Yet, my maid has somehow developed a liking for reading. Certainly, she reads far more (in Tamil) than many graduates of English read (in English).

Frankly speaking, she is too good to be a housemaid but our system offers her nothing else. There is no worthwhile occupa­tion nearer to her home that would enable her to live with her family.

She is married to an estate worker who has a good factory job but her two children make it mandatory that she works too.

I am now privy to what her seven-year-old son is doing at his little school. There are 55 children in this estate school and classes go up to Grade 5. After that, students switch to a nearby maha vidyalaya.

Of course, the stupidity of trying to teach young children the three different scripts of English, Sinhala and Tamil has been overcome by an obviously motivated teacher who largely concentrates on speaking the languages rather than writing them.

The idea of Romanising the Sinhala and Tamil scripts was shouted down before it could be properly discussed. The way languages are taught in Sri Lanka doesn’t ensure that kids are proficient in them. After three years of studying Tamil in a local school, Sinhalese kids can (maybe) sing a song or two.

Students have found three scripts too difficult to master. If teachers could stick to conversational teaching of three languages, we may have better results. The idea behind all this is to help unify our citizens.

Is this happening?

The little estate school I mentioned arranged a concert for officers from the Department of Education who visited the school to distribute books, bags etc. And the school felt it needed to show its gratitude and my maid’s son was trained in a cute little dance along with nine others. An impromptu stage was set up and they participated in some way.

I watched a video of the event on my maid’s phone and noted that the concert showed imagination and talent.

This story serves to illustrate how important training is for teachers. This particular school was lucky. A naturally good head teacher was available. But this is a rare occurrence since round pegs are often placed in square holes as far as government schoolteachers and principals are concerned.

When the government talks about establishing more universities, I cringe. It can’t finance even the present system but is unbelievably planning on installing a four-year degree in education.

I have a few questions for the government…

Where can the qualified personnel needed to train future teachers be found? Are we going to import them?

The grandiose schemes of our education minister sound like one of Wagner’s unworkable operas.

Private schools naturally perform better. They have the freedom of choice so they do better. Children of government schools face an education shaped by chauvinists and an out-of-date Department of Education.

Except for the president and his cabinet, there is no one with the power to do anything about this national tragedy; and those with the power to help are indifferent to the disaster. Unless we switch to an education in the English medium, Sri Lankan citizens will remain disunited and unable to cope with the world – both here at home and beyond our shores.

But history moves on irrespective of wherever one sits. Before we adopt stupid trumpet blasting schemes of politicians, let us begin to think seriously.