And We Must All Walk The Talk
Malinda Seneviratne
The Government could say that FUTA (Federation of University Teachers’ Associations) inflated the numbers. They could say that NGO money frilled it. They could say that lecturers and others were pawns or were complicit in a sinister political game.Analysts could say that the demands are unjust or else indicative of infantile analytical ability which itself subverts the agitation and robs it of moral authority. Few, it could be said, would have understood what the ‘6%’ slogansignified, even if a cogent argument around that figure could be made.
Some might say, on the lines of that old adage, ‘no taxation without representation’, that ‘rights without responsibility’ and ‘free education without moral obligation to return the favor to society’ just do not make sense.
A lot more indeed has been said about the long march organized by FUTA from Galle to Colombo last week. For example, that just as it was about ‘state education’ and ‘saving’ of the same, it was also an avenue to express frustration, anger, fear and such regarding what the Government has been and has not being doing over the past several years.
Times have changed since this country went through ‘1971’ and ‘1988-89’ and what those years signify. A few decades ago an undergraduate who owned a push bicycle might have been called ‘privileged’. Later, there were scooters and motorcycles. Today some come to campus by car. Many have laptops. They have sophisticated cameras too. The FUTA campaign is all over Facebook. Blogs dedicated to the struggle or else which have adopted it as something that warrants daily comment have mushroomed.
Does all this mean that the general population has somehow been yanked out or has upped itself out of endemic poverty? Does it mean that those who benefit from free education must always look poor? No. The truth is that although things don’t trickle down the way some economics would like us to believe they would, things have got better at the bottom. This does not mean that the ‘top’ has idled. The truth is that gaps have widened. Costs have soared. Just because an undergraduate rides a motorcycle or wields a camcorder or hammers out status updates about an agitation campaign on Facebook, this does not mean that higher education costs have come down or that they have become affordable to the vast majority of the population somehow.
