IS POOR SCHOOLING THE CAUSE OFSTUDENT TANTRUMS IN SRI LANKANUNIVERSITIES?

by Goolbai Gunasekara

For the last five decades, the Daily Press has been highlighting the requests, then complaints, finally outright DEMANDS of our totally unworthy university students. I will correct that. A small percentage of them ARE worth what our government is spending on them, but that number is negligible enough to make the money wasted on the rest of them a crime —specially so in a financially strapped country like Sri Lanka.

It is one of our national tragedies that there has been no upgrading of student behaviour and expected gratitude levels. Before pouring money on ungrateful and underperforming young men and women the mindset of students must be completely altered.

This pathetic bunch of today’s ingrates actually expect jobs at the end of their studies and have the nerve to make public protests because the Government has not employed them. I would like to see them DARE to make such ridiculous demands in any of the advanced countries of the world. Even in the less advanced countries such demands are met with nothing other than derisive laughter. What I do not understand is why these protests are tolerated.

Since that uncalled of expulsion of a defenseless girl (wrongly accused by an outstation Principal) I have begun to ask myself whether the narrow minded and unprogressive attitude of the schools out of the main cities could be responsible for the frustrations students carry with them from school to University?

Taught by men and women with no idea how to be teachers, these students absorb the unprogressive ideas (passed off as traditional beliefs) and enter the higher studies programme as ill prepared as their teachers were

I am not referring to book knowledge. That requires a series of articles by itself. I am referring to attitudes. Attitudes of compassion, attitudes of tolerance, attitudes of maturity, attitudes of kindness, attitudes of acceptance of other’s drawbacks attitudes of patience and above all attitudes of gratitude for what they receive from a government that does more for them than any other government in the world. Why are these attitudes not fostered?

So what would be a good beginning? Obviously, our teachers have to be well trained. Foisting untrained and raw graduates on outstation schools is perpetuating the existing sad situation. A young man or woman may have a certain amount of book learning — enough to pass the exams at least — but what has she/he learnt around the subject? What exposure does the University offer to the many men and women who are there on the quota system and are not the best examples of the youth of this country?

They enter University as a favour bestowed on them by an unthinking system. Many are only the best of a really bad bunch and telling me that some of them have earlier passed that equally silly Grade Five exam with flying colours further perpetuates the memorization habits of our Sri Lankan students. This will not do.

Both teachers and students have to be given lessons in global attitudes. TV programmes OTHER than the local channels should be made available to University students so that their horizons can spread in many directions. Just watching the National Geographic and Animal Planet channels has upgraded the standard of English of many of my pupils who refuse to read.

The English language of these programmes is so good that constant exposure to them for an hour a day has resulted in an upward zooming of language skills to say nothing of the general knowledge they imbibe along the way. I know this because I have tested it.

Providing small outstation schools with a TV set that has access to world programmes (not Sinhala/Tamil ones only) is one possibility. Watching for an hour a day in school could be made compulsory. Now THIS expenditure on education would be worth it.

Of course the TVs will need to be serviced and looked after. Knowing the care taken of such things by Government Schools I wonder how long they will be in active use! Assuming they DO remain usable the Dept. could check for itself as to the progress in general.

Frankly speaking we have the tools of technology to help both students and teachers. Silly TV dramas should be merely for entertainment. Since almost everything can be Googled and information is just a click away, let our schools in the outstations begin to reach out to a world the students cannot imagine even exists.

No one is foolish enough to imagine this alone is going to improve the attitudes and behaviour that now exists among the majority of our pathetic University student bunch but it is a start.

Ensure that Principals like the one who reacted so appallingly stupidly recently when confronted by an intensely personal student problem are never put in charge of young people again. Can we really blame the University students of Sri Lanka for having attitudes of inferiority and using vicious ragging practices to work off their frustrations when they have the example of such teachers and Principals before them!

Respect for teachers in their school will carry over to their University lives also. At the moment respect for authority is nil.

(Excerpted from The ‘Principal’ Factor first published in Lanka Market Digest)