A Medic woos Sarasvat

Book Review:

Book: Ruptures in Sri Lanka’s Education: Genesis, Present Status and Reflections.

Author:

Panduka Karunanayake.

Published by Sarasavi Publishers. Available for online purchase at www.sarasavi.lk

Reviewed
by Usvatte-aratchi

Professor Panduka Karunanayake of the Faculty of Medicine, Colombo has issued a very welcome book: mostly a collection of essays and notes he wrote to newspapers and two public lectures. They cover huge areas of social policy and therefore are very likely to give rise to public debate, all very welcome.

Panduka (if he will pardon me) belongs in a tradition of medical personnel who have interested themselves in problems in this society, well beyond health and medical care. Gunadasa Amarasekera, a dental surgeon, is the grand master of them all. He contributed innovation in Sinhala fiction and poetry and more recently has been very articulate about public policy on a large number of issues. Carlo Fonseka was a superb academic leader, a fine teacher of Physiology, a public intellectual of the first order who was a member of the LSSP all his adult life, a rationalist who did much to dispel superstition, a lyricist, a connoisseur and patron of the arts and a debater par excellence in print. S.N. Arsecularatne, a distinguished member of the Peradeniya Faculty who cultivated many interests, addressed a narrower audience on the growth of knowledge. Susirith Mendis, another highly distinguished teacher of Physiology, brought new perspectives to bear on whatever social phenomena he examined. N.A.de S. Amaratunge, an outstanding oral surgeon, has taken up many issues. More recently, Upul Wijayawardhana an eminent cardiologist, Sarath Gamini de Silva an eminent physician and B.J.C Perera a distinguished paediatrician have begun to comment on features in our society. Occasionally A.H. Sheriffdeen, an eminent surgeon, also contributed. Panduka Karunanayake joins that brilliant galaxy not too far away from earth, that has shed much light on murky areas in our society. His main area is education, especially university education. Sarasvati is the goddess of knowledge in the Hindu pantheon, and some of us prefer to signify a university in Sinhala as sarasaviya.

I have lived through the entire process which Panduka writes about. I was educated with taxpayers’ money, all the way. They were central schools for a long time. (Central college is a foolish affectation, following the names of the denominational schools that copied the nomenclature from Public Schools in England.) The most valuable assets of central schools were their teachers, especially principals. From Sumanasuriya in Wanduramba, Devendra in Hikkaduwa, Jayasuriya in Matugama, Jayatilleke in Ibbagamuva, Eratna in Anuradhapura to Ekanayake and Wilmot de Silva in Pelmadulla, they showed a commitment, enterprise and initiative that now seem impossible. (Old-timers still reminisce Jayatilleke together with parents clearing the jungle in the school yard.) They in turn collected staff of teachers that now seem to have come from another world.

Apart from outstanding teachers, central schools in those early years had little to commend themselves. Choices were limited: no Mathematics, no Science, no Pali, no Sanskrt, no Greek, no Latin and many others. W.A.de Silva, the Director of Education, reported that in 1948, 17,000 persons applied for positions as English teachers but not even 1,700 were found competent. That rueful trend continues to date. Facilities were woefully limited: no libraries, no laboratories and no playgrounds. Yet those principals, teachers and students worked wonders. Parents were too ill-informed to instruct either their offspring or, of course, teachers.

It is good to recall that teachers, especially in the English medium, were then paid about four times the GDP per capita. The foolish policy of governments to pay teachers no higher than the average per capita income as now has destroyed the elan of the corpus of principals and teachers. That is a consequence of the massification of secondary education that has cost us dearly, which Panduka speaks of. Costs of inevitable massification have to be counted when one sings of its benefits.

It is useful to recall that secondary education was massified in the US around 1900, after its economy became the leading economy in the world. If you compare internationally, countries that pay their schoolteachers decent wages (Finland, Sweden, Denmark and France) have excellent school systems. High wages paid to schoolteachers in Africa are scarcity rent and will be whittled away in time. Secondary school systems in the US too have been destroyed by low wages paid to teachers.

The nature of secondary and university education has undergone much change all over the world during the last 50 years. And the essential quality of such education is flexibility rather than fixity for long. If you read the advertisements put out by tuition masters selling their skills on television now, you will be struck by the wide spectrum of vocational courses that children follow from grade 10 to 13 in school – the last four years in school. They expect to be selected to universities for the study of these courses and to pursue careers in them. These courses are very different from what bright students went through a mere 50 years back, when my age cohort left university. To mourn over a system of education that one benefited from but is now shunned by students and parents alike is futile. The ideals espoused by Cardinal Newman and admired for long have had to be discarded in the midst of rapidly changing economic factors. Universities are more the handmaidens of industry than ever. This book invites the reader to debate these questions rather than accept dicta laid down by men in power but with little authority.

Panduka presses the policies he talks about through three sieves: equality of opportunity, equality of outcome and quality of outcome. He is also concerned with whether education is provided by the public or the private sector and with university freedoms. He explores, to some distance, the function of universities in society. However, the book is organized on different axis (especially his attempt at periodization), making the task of a reviewer that much harder and I will lose some valuable insights he develops.

Let us take the Kannangara reforms as an effort at promoting equality of opportunities. Compared to what prevailed prior to that, it was a distinctly successful attempt to greater equality of opportunity. In 1974 I published a paper comparing the economic and social background of university entrants in 1967-68 with those in 1950 (Strauss). The effect of Kannangara reforms in spreading opportunities to enter university were much in evidence in 1967-68.

It is important to keep in mind that their effects were compounded with the change in the medium of instruction into Sinhala/Tamil. The latter was far more powerful than the reforms. Sometime in 1967, I went with G.P. Malalasekera, then Chairman of the National Council of Education, to discuss with Minister Iriyagolla the problems that arose with teaching in Sinhala in universities. When the question of admission of students who had little knowledge of English came up, the inister was quite straightforward: “I cannot go to Meegahakotuva and tell the people there that their children who had been taught for 12 years in Sinhala, in government schools, now could not go to university unless they had a knowledge of English”.

At the same time, the rising proportion of a larger number of children in an increasing population compounded the problems of providing good university education.

Government had been heedless, and neglected thinking about these problems and considered the creation of two new universities sufficient to solve the problems. (Jennings did not see that what he accomplished in Peradeniya was utterly inadequate to meet with the demographic changes that were manifestly evident at the 1946 Census and the 1952 Census.) Some academics, in their zeal for the promotion of indigenous languages, also misled the politicians.

The consequences were a fall in the quality of education, especially in social studies and languages. Mathematics and Science could muddle through. Engineering and Medicine continued regardless. Good university teachers do not come about with the same speed as governments change their policies, and the scarcity of competent teachers stood in the way of providing high quality education. The present government with ambitious programmes for expanding university education had better look sharp. There was a clash with the ideals of promoting equality of opportunities and the maintaining of high quality university education.

Recent research has made it abundantly clear that whatever the positive steps that governments take to reduce inequality in opportunities, family culture plays a major part in the outcome. The outstanding evidence in Lanka is the scarcity of entrants to universities from homes of people who work in tea plantations and live in ‘lines’. In Allahabad, in a faculty strength of 112 teachers, 76% were Brahmin and Kayastha, when their proportion in the total population of Uttar Pradesh was 20%. In US, SAT scores are persistently in this order of excellence from the least to the highest: Blacks, Latinos, Whites and Asians. It is shocking to most people that Black people who have for generations lived as free men in that country continue to stand disadvantaged in the ladder of scores in test scores. The explanation is mostly in the poverty of home culture, as is the case in India, where the relevant categories are Dalits and Brahmins and others superior castes.

In Sri Lanka in 2019, of some 10,000 government schools, only 1,000 were classified as 1AB schools and had classes teaching up to grade 13 with facilities for teaching Science and Technology. In contrast, there were 1,900 1C schools teaching up to Grade 13 in Arts and Commerce. In the rest, or 2 out of every 3 schools, there were no facilities for teaching beyond Grade 11. In contrast, 2 out of every 3 teachers were in the other one-third of schools (1AB+1C). Inequalities in opportunities are written into the structure of schools. It is not the preferences of parents and students that sends hoards of students to study languages and social studies. Governments have programmed supply lines to do so. No amount of fidgeting at the apex will modify that foundation of the pyramid.

Private tuition follows roughly the same pattern. Private tuition, on which Panduka comments, is not something peculiar to Sri Lanka. In Britain, in 2019, 25% of children aged 11-16 years received some kind of private teaching outside schools. In China, parents spent over $10,000 per term to coach children for the university entrance examination; New Oriental and TAL Education are two of the biggest education companies in China. From Juku in Japan to large corporations in California, it is common flora in the jungle of these plants. In China, ‘princes’ (offspring of the privileged) end up learning in Ivy League colleges, with children of common people unable to send their offspring to a city school in China, because they do not have a hou kou to live in that neighbourhood. Finding solutions to problem of substantially reducing inequality in opportunities for higher education is going to be a hard nut to crack.

I will comment, even if briefly, on the problems in dealing with political interference in education. With government paying for all university education, it is inevitable that there will be political interference with matters of university education. All state, city and community colleges and universities in the US are maintained mostly with government funds. Most great universities in Germany and France are owned and paid for by the state. There have been many reports on the abuse of power over universities by States in India.

Governments do interfere in university life, but whether such intervention is beneficial or not depends on the degree of enlightenment among those running government. Recall the great Wilhelm von Humboldt of Prussia and Mori Arinori of Japan – both ministers of government and founders of great universities. Learning and reading that do not run beyond a capacity to read a teleprompter is not likely to be sufficient to nurse universities to excellence. While governments ambitiously interfere in running universities, their incapacity to eliminate rapacious ragging in our universities is outrageous.

There is another kind of interference in the work of universities: obstructing independent inquiry. Such interference comes from both governments and large corporations who determine the programmes of research which they espouse. We know from experience that knowledge grows best when exposed to free examination. Consequently, all measures taken by governments to curb free inquiry in universities are to be deplored as unhealthy.

I have exhausted my ration of words to review Professor Karunanayake’s book. Yet there are three other main issues that he explores which I have not touched: employability of the output of the system, the functioning of a parallel private sector in education and the clash of elites’ interests.

Professor Karunanayake’s arguments are sound and fortuitously timely. The Minister of Education announced some time back that the government would reconsider the entire design and content of education. It is your function to contribute to those mighty tasks. Professor Karunanayake’s book helps.