Lee Kwan Yew thought downgrading English main reason for our downfall

In congratulating you on this latest initiative ( launch of Logos, the journal of the Department of Languages), I should add that I am deeply honoured by this gesture on the part of the University and the Faculty, to make this first issue a felicitation volume for me. It was also thoughtful of you to have invited Dr Chitra Jayatilleka to deliver the keynote address today, since she represents what is best about what I consider my other university, that of Sri Jayewardenepura.

I cannot take credit for her achievements, though she would be the first to recognize that, had it not been for the system I put in place at that University, she would not be here today. Her achievements are ample testimonial, as are those of your staff here, to the validity of our decision then to open up English degrees to those who had not done English for their Advanced Levels. And though I did not stay long at that University, I was lucky in that, just as in this University, I was able to recruit excellent staff who took forward my ideas and, as with Chitra and her promotion of Sri Lankan drama in English, developed new ideas on similar lines.

I am immensely proud then of what I managed to do at that university and this one, and of the students who have taken things forward. But with regard to the University of Peradeniya, where I began my teaching career, way back in 1980, since I made no mark at all, I cannot take pride in my brief stint there. But even had I stayed on, perhaps I would not have achieved much, since one of the brightest stars in the English academic firmament, Prof Arjuna Parakrama, who is very different from me in his approach but who shares a similar commitment to students and to productive change, has confessed himself beaten by the place. Having long aspired to the Chair there, he remarked after he had got it that it was even worse than Colombo.

Be that as it may, the point is that, though there are exceptions at both places, those institutions are hidebound in moribund traditions, and like Pope’s Addison simply sit attentive to their own applause. This is very different from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, which Prof Arjuna Aluvihare, the best UGC Chairman to date, described soon after I joined it as the cutting edge of the university system.

Much has been achieved there, and much at this University. However I come here now at a time when there is a requirement of much more, if this country is ever to return to the leading position it had when the Prime Minister of Singapore hoped that he could bring that country to our level. And I fear that the current project to improve things in the University sector, more money poured down the drain to repeat what has been done again and again, from the year 2000 onward when the irksome IRQUE project first reared its head, money that future bankrupted generations will have to repay, will achieve very little. And that will then allow the World Bank and its cookie-cutting educationists to embark on yet another expensive project, with much more money having to be paid back by those who lack the skills to develop the country productively, and as a consequence try to get away as soon as possible.

Perhaps because of the comfort zone these World Bank projects have engendered, there is nothing of the imaginative radicalism that characterized the period when Arjuna Aluvihare was in charge. And so I feel that, while what I think of as both my institutions try to move forward, they work now in grooves, and do not promote the seminal change which we need.

This is particularly important with regard to English, the downgrading of which as you know Lee Kuan Yew thought the principal reason for our downfall. And that we get worse and worse was brought home to me forcefully when a former senior public servant, now engaged in teaching at higher levels, called to tell me he was in despair about the incapacity of students at one of the premier institutes of management to write correctly. Subject-verb agreement, he said mournfully, was unknown to them. I too, having marked papers recently for your potentially useful MA course in English and Education, which takes up what I tried to do a quarter of a century ago, I am horrified by the English usage of some of those supposed to have degrees in English.

That set me thinking about what might have been, and I make no apologies that what I have to say relates to my own initiatives. For though I can be happy about what I began in the university sector, for that has continued, with many more students able to obtain degrees in English as compared to when it was confined to a charmed circle coming from elite urban schools, I have to confess that my efforts in other areas, secondary education and vocational training, have failed.

The step by step teaching of English envisioned in the curriculum I introduced when I chaired the Academic Affairs Board of the National Institute of Education was promptly abolished when a new Chairman was appointed following a change of government in 2006. He cannot be blamed for the mess except for his failure to impose coherence. But when the dead souls of the NIE took charge, and appointed to advisory positions their incompetent friends, we had a spate of silly books which have completely failed to ensure understanding of basic structures in English.

It is true English medium still continues in government schools but, ever since the current President refused soon after we had commenced it to allow Karunasena Kodituwakku to extend my appointment to run the programme, standards declined, and in place of the systematic training and the excellent textbooks I had initiated, the incompetence of the Ministry and the National Institute of Education hold sway. And as for Vocational Training, the system I put in place to offer English courses at all levels was abandoned, and while Ministers bleat about the need for more English, they do nothing constructive about it.

I have no doubt that nothing will now be done to make things better, but it might help if the universities at least took these problems seriously, and addressed themselves to identifying issues and suggesting remedies.

This was something I proposed when I was briefly State Minister of Higher Education, namely that there should be coherent research done by each university, instead of what we now have, projects chosen at random which cannot then be connected together to improve current practice in different fields.

I wonder now how many Vice-Chancellors, then or now, have any memory of what I proposed, that there should be concerted study of problems in the Divisional Secretariats that formed the catchment areas of each university, so these could contribute to a development plan which the universities could propose to authorities. Heaven knows that this is needed, when currently development funds are devoted to enhancing political popularity, not to development.

I also tried, when I was Minister, to address coherently another problem, though to my horror no one else seems to consider it a problem. I refer to the massive waste of time imposed by our education system. At its most obvious, whereas in other countries there is seamless movement from one level to another, we call a halt after the Ordinary Level examination, which means that our youngsters lose a minimum of four months of their lives, though more often it is six. Worse, the practice of learning in school is totally decimated, a process that had begun earlier with tuition classes from childhood, but now parents have no choice except tuition to keep children gainfully – or not gainfully – employed. Then there is massive waste after the Advanced Level Examination and, though some universities have tried to start soon after results are released, this is exceptional and in any case the release of the results only occurs months after the examination.

This needs to be addressed by reducing the delay, but until that happens there should be measures to use the time productively, with for instance remedial courses in English and Mathematics in Divisional Centres in the three months after the Ordinary Level, with basic core courses such as any modern university system offers in the period after the Advanced Level – Critical Thinking, Bilingualism, Communication Skills, International Awareness.

Interestingly, I was told by one of the MA students, who works for the American Centre, that she plans a Critical Thinking Conference early next week, which suggests that there is wider awareness of the problem. Coincidentally too, in the articles I am now writing about those I have worked with in the university sector, I have explored recently the range of core courses we introduced when this university first took in students for degrees, way back in 1997.

But sadly I believe that particular component was dropped from your curriculum when Sabaragamuwa too forgot the innovations its first Vice-Chancellor Prof Somasundara initiated. All of you will remember how the University Grants Commission tried over many years to destroy the three year Honours Degree Somasundara had started, and how finally they succeeded when conservatism briefly held sway here. So we too waste the resources of the nation, and make no effort to provide essentials for life to our students, working instead to a notion of academia that the world has long abandoned.

But let me move to some practical ideas, for I should not go on for too long, based on something I noticed in the latest Grade 11 English textbook. That at least is not full of misprints, as had been the case earlier, but it continues the practice of being one of a set of three books, all expensively produced, a Pupil’s Book, a Workbook, and a Teacher’s Guide. In other countries there is just the one book, but those other countries have not developed to a fine are the rent-seeking our system has engendered.

The last chapter is about ‘Choices in Life’ and tells you what five students want to do. All of them talk about what they wish to do at university and therefore what they will study for their advanced levels. There are three Sinhalese and one Muslim and one Tamil, and they come from Batticaloa, Kurunegala, Galle, Anuradhapura and Nuwara Eliya.

Admirable diversity, except that rural students do not figure. Even worse is the fact that there is no conception of the real choices students in this country have to make, and no effort to introduce them to vocational training.

Perhaps these and other such books would be suitable subjects for research for student projects at universities. A class of English students could divide the work up and, having gone to several schools in a designated area, find out how much students have learnt, both of English and what appear to be the life skills drilled into them in almost all lessons, what they think of the reading texts and the poetry, and above all what they actually need for their futures.

Surely they do not need flatulent knowledge, already done to death in history textbooks from Grade 1 onward, about kings who built tanks, including Agbo 1 and Agbo 2, particular favourites of the National Institute of Education? There is hardly anything about the former in Wikipedia, except that he reigned for 34 years in the sixth century and was succeeded by his nephew. But the Wikipedia entry for Agbo 2 had different dates for his reign, though doubtless it is considered essential to know in the 21st century that he built the Kantale and Giritale tanks. Perhaps you too will remember that, even if you forget everything else I said, since that it seems is what our current administrators want our students to know.

Finally, may I suggest that those who have studied English here or at Sri Jayewardenepura set up a ginger group to urge reforms in the field? There are several products of the initiatives of the nineties who have done great jobs wherever they are, Dean Abeyweera at Uva Wellassa, Nandana Balasooriya who did so much for English at the Department of Technical Education and Training, Shashikala Assella who heads the Department of English at Kelaniya, to name just a few. You can make suggestions as to curriculum reform, the production of common materials, the introduction of community service centres to provide services to students in deprived areas.

You can produce a newsletter about best practices in the field, to disseminate for instance amongst the teachers who are on your training programmes. And most important, you can initiate through the universities Certificate courses, of three months duration, for English and perhaps Computer competence too, based on the three month courses developed a few years back with the support of the Skills Councils of the Tertiary and Vocational Commission.

I am grateful for this Festschrift, an honour I associate with venerable old age and, though I am not quite seventy, this is a sort of seal on my academic career. But having in a sense abandoned academic approaches half a life ago, I would also suggest that an even more fitting tribute would be aids to action which I believe several of you can help to get going. That, I hope, is what most of you would like to be remembered for, and what your teachers, including the indefatigable Paru Nagasunderam would expect, a continuation of student centred initiatives.