Thinking outside Kuppi-box

by Panduka Karunanayake

The recent series of articles in The Island, entitled ‘Kuppi Talk’, should be commended, for attempting to generate a much-needed discussion on some crucial issues in education. Education builds nations. Destroying education destroys the nation – Sri Lanka (and Ceylon before that) being an evocative example of this. Everyone who knows and acknowledges this would value a discussion like Kuppi Talk.

Several articles in the series were excellent, brief expositions of important issues in education, especially higher education. Everyone with an interest in education, particularly young recruits to the academia, must read them – even if, sadly, they might not make an iota of difference to policy. They could still make an enormous difference within the academia, in its ideas, practices and directions. After all, to command respect from the wider society, the academia must first prove worthy of it – and this proof can come only from within.

Lessons to learn

Niyanthini Kadirgamar’s article on the underfunding of education (March 16) reminded me of the days of University Teachers for Dialogue & Democracy (UT4DD), when we first grappled with this problem. Although time has marched on, it appears that we have remained on or circled around the same spot. Nevertheless, she has brought us uptodate on the situation.

It was particularly saddening for me to note that we missed the bus in the years soon after 2015, not only with regard to improving funding for education but also with regard to the reforms to university governance that we attempted. The report on the university governance workshop that was spearheaded by Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda and published in 2016 remains burried in the dusts of time.

Shamala Kumar’s article on ragging (March 30) is the best encapsulation of the subject I have read. She has brought into it her long experience, wide knowledge, analytical acumen and genuine concern. It would be an unpardonable folly for anyone to embark on trying to understand or solve this problem without first reading this article.

Anushka Kahandagamage’s article (April 13), on the value of arts for nation-building in our conflict-riddled society and the danger of pursuing an exclusively STEM-focused line in education, brought together its argument very eloquently. But I wonder whether she could have balanced her focus on Sinhala-Buddhist supremacy in textbook officialese, by also looking at the co-existing, parallel system of Muslim education and its contribution to differentiation, dissociation and discord (which even moderate Muslims have highlighted). It is noteworthy that this parallel system has a long history (see for instance Mahroof, Journal of Islamic Studies 1995;6:25).

Kaushalya Perera’s article on quality in higher education (May 25) nicely summarised a complex, multi-faceted topic. I was especially pleased to see that she touched on the importance of qualification inflation (although not using that term) in graduate unemployment. This is an aspect that policy-makers and politicians gloss over, because it threatens to take the problem from its soft end (i.e., changing curricula in universities) to the hard end (i.e., expanding the industries to enhance employment opportunities). Her exposition of the dangers of the corporatisation of the academia was excellent.

Kaushalya Herath wrote on the need to decolonise our universities from neocolonial hegemonic knowledge structures and situate them more firmly on our own soil (June 08). It provided an eloquent argument in the fewest of words. Herath rightly laments that “universities, once the executors of cultural colonisation, are being colonised by the corporate sector”. In the 1950s this happened to Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara pirivenas when they were converted to universities (i.e., cultural colonisation), and in the present day it is happening to indigenous medicine where its academics are on a mission to ‘modernise’ it to answer the call of the market (i.e., corporate colonisation).

Thus, current efforts in our universities that try to ‘re-discover’ indigenous knowhow run the risk of re-inventing indigenous knowhow through western epistemologies to fit it into western-styled markets, garnished with a populist layer of ‘heritage’ or ‘naturalness’. If our minds are so successfully ‘colonised’, where can indigenous knowhow turn to? Probably to non-university institutions funded and run by philanthropists (which don’t themselves turn into universities after a few decades). And that says something about our universities!

The other articles were focused on the problem of unemployment or ‘unemployability’ of Arts graduates. This was highlighted by a National Audit Office (NAO) report released in November 2020, which stated that more than 50% of our Arts graduates were unemployed (which the Parliamentary Committee on Public Accounts then famously quoted in March 2021). Sivamohan Sumathy in her article (March 02) shed some valuable light on the methodological problems of the studies that had formed the basis for the NAO report. The articles by Farzana Haniffa (April 27) and Hasini Lecamwasam (May 11) elaborated the problem further.

Let me now turn to some points to ponder that this series should trigger.

Undergraduate numbers vs. quality

There appears to be some resentment among Social Science and Humanities (SSH) academics regarding reducing the number of students following Arts degree programmes. To me this is puzzling. Would it not be better to settle for a smaller number of students? The available resources could then be used more effectively, to enhance the quality of the graduate (whichever way they may want to define quality).

Perhaps this resentment is driven by a worry that some Arts degree programmes and departments may become redundant. I wonder, however, whether we can innovate solutions to this. For instance, can we not provide SSH as compulsory studies for all undergraduates (and even postgraduates) in their foundation years?

This is not something new. The value of a multi-faceted education in the formative years is increasingly recognised. In 2005 the Supreme Court of India in a much-celebrated, public-spirited decision determined that every undergraduate must be taught a course on environment studies. In 2009 Professor Carlo Fonseka in his Kannangara Oration suggested something similar: “Once students are selected for different courses in the universities, they should be required to spend a year on a Foundation Course in English,…computer literacy [and] cultural studies.” Our university senates still have enough academic freedom to introduce changes of this nature.

Or is this resentment merely driven by an ideology? Is ideology preventing us from seeing the obvious?

Why dichotomise?

To solve the Arts graduates’ unemployment problem, we are constantly asked to choose between two options. On the one hand is the transformative educational experience that academics propose, handsomely described by Sivamohan Sumathy in her article. On the other hand is the neoliberal, competencies-focused education that the World Bank proposes.

But why do we have to choose between them? Why can’t we combine the two? Can’t we combine the “package of skills and competencies” with the sense of “self, person, society” that we want the graduate to develop – rather than seeing these as opposites that can’t mix? The transformative education is what the people need (in our opinion), and the neoliberal model is what they want. Why can’t we give students an education that they need in a form that they would want? In fact, this sort of education is the only sort of education that is worth giving and receiving.

It is true that these current threats and anxieties are due to an externally imposed challenge (i.e., neoliberalism), and one might not like it. But it is important to remember that universities have never been free of or immune to such challenges.

Historically, the arrival of printing, the rise of the nation state, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of democracy, the Cold War, the rise of the knowledge industries, the slow economic recession of the 1970s and the fall of the Communist bloc all challenged, re-defined and re-shaped the university. (Eric Lybeck’s The University Revolution is a fascinating recent book on this.) It is true that the academia should have its own terms of engagement with society and its own definition of itself (and Sivamohan Sumathy’s article is a good starting point for this). But it is also imperative that we cannot expect to remain meaningful and relevant to society if we lack sensitivity, flexibility and manoeuverability towards society’s immediate anxieties.

Semantic errors

A common error in academic circles is bundling together globalisation, corporatisation, commoditisation and privatisation into one basket of despised entities. This is evident in Sivamohan Sumathy’s article: “In the current context, globalization is another name for the rapid development of capitalist financialization, and a dissolution of labour as a collective force and as a movement toward socialized citizenry.” Well, actually not. Globalisation, as everyone knows, is a neutral phenomenon that can be applied for various tasks, bad and good. She does qualify this tectonic shift in the meaning of globalisation by appealing to “the current context”. But then, let us at least keep in mind that contexts are generated, fluid and reflexive. After all, our context belongs to us.

I have no problem in accepting that corporatisation of the academia is something bad, or that commodification of education is bad. I also appreciate that uncontrolled privatisation of education paves way for the commodification of education. But here, there are two problems. First, uncontrolled privatisation is not the only form that privatisation of education can take place (unless if we prevent the other forms). Second, privatisation of education in one form or the other is here to stay, because of the huge demand, and the public is already consuming it – our real challenge is to shape it to the nation’s advantage.

Privatisation can take many forms. It can be not-for-profit. We have had examples of private educational institutions that were started by philanthropy and served communities enormously. Sivamohan Sumathy will know the value of the education that American missionaries in the nineteenth century and the philanthropy-funded Jaffna Public Library in the twentieth century added to Jaffna culture. Her friends from the South will know how much H.W. Amarasuriya added to the educational culture of the Southern Province in the twentieth century. Hundreds of thousands of our citizens and families have benefitted from the many private schools and pirivenas set up by indigenous revivalist movements of all three main ethnic groups at the turn of the twentieth century; they were originally private (but supported by the colonial government), and were only later taken over by the state.

To see this broader picture, we need to rename private education as ‘non-state education’ and accept that it belongs in the ‘public sphere’ of our communities and the country – because the word ‘private’ carries too many erroneous connotations and emotive baggage. These institutions serve the public, and the benefits are therefore also public – both individually and collectively. What we must focus on is not their dissolution or ‘nationalisation’, but their quality, cost and access. Quality should be supervised by the state. Cost can be brought down by incentives, which do not necessarily require state funds. And access can be widened by financing mechanisms such as bursaries and loan schemes that ensure that deserving students admitted on merit would not be denied access.

Back to the past or to the future?

Even if one didn’t agree with such arguments, they are still part of a healthy, diverse and inclusive discussion. Such a discussion is not helped by defining globalisation as what it is not, pushing privatisation into the devil’s corner, or presenting the unemployment problem as a dichotomy without middle ground, and building the argument thereon. When our discussion becomes irrelevant and detached from reality, the people ignore us and go on to take whatever option available to them – franchised degrees, cross-border higher education, etc. While we debate on the dichotomy, our students still yearn for those skills and turn elsewhere.

Should we limit our discussion to what our ideologies allow, or have a discussion unhindered by them? Should we live in our past, or reach for the future? That is the crucial question that the UT4DD failed to answer then, to its detriment. Kuppi Talk must address it now.

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The writer is Professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo. His email address is panduka@clinmed.cmb.ac.lk