Education: The Elusive & Much Maligned 6%
By Harini Amarasuriya –December 4, 2015
Dr. Harini Amarasuriya
The eagerly anticipated 2016 budget has already given rise to much discussion, debate and controversy. Trade unions including the powerful Government Medical Officers Association (GMOA) and the Sri Lanka Administration Services Union (SLAS) are threatening strikes mainly over the withdrawal of duty free car permits. A no confidence motion signed by 44 parliamentarians against the Finance Minister, Ravi Karunanayake has been handed over to the Speaker. Opposition MPs have been threatening to make sure the budget is defeated. My intention in this article is to consider some of the implications of the budget on the education sector and to try to understand what this budget suggests in terms of the government’s overall approach to education.
One of the ‘promises’ made during the election campaigns this year from all the different political groups, was increasing the allocation for education to reach 6% of GDP. This was a direct result of the very successful campaign led by the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations (FUTA) in 2012 to increase state spending on education. During the FUTA struggle of 2012, there were actually two slogans that spearheaded the campaign: one, was the 6% demand, the other was the demand to protect and strengthen state education. The 6% slogan became the more popular of the two slogans, with most of the imagery and discussions about the struggle centering around the 6% campaign. Yet, from the point of view of FUTA, the two slogans were equally important and in fact closely linked. The demand for 6% was made in the context of a clear shift by successive governments towards the commodification of education. That is, the idea that education was simply another ‘good’ that could be regulated by the market. This shift was evident in many ways: the growth of private educational institutions was the most obvious, but there was other equally if not more serious developments. These included, the massive growth of the private tuition industry, almost to the point of making schools irrelevant; increasing demands on parents time and money for filling gaps in schools facing severe financial constraints due to funding cuts; introduction of fee-levying courses in state educational institutions, especially universities often in parallel to non-fee levying courses; and the gradual redefining of the goals and objectives of education as simply a means of preparing human resources to serve the market. This redefinition of the goals of education, were often presented as needing to improve the quality of education in order to increase ‘employability’ or the oft-repeated mantra that there was a gap between education and the demands of employers. This was how the ‘crisis’ in education was defined.