Wednesday, 6 July 2016
Free education may have served the purpose of politicians by keeping up a façade of equality, but it is time to take off our rose-tinted glasses and begin to look at the reality of education and social mobility in Sri Lanka, beginning with a better understanding of issues of social mobility in general
Whenever I travel out of Colombo visiting places from childhood, I am struck by what little education has done to bridge social classes. After more than 70 years of free education, the gran children of village headmen and the grandchildren of those who served the village headmen seem to be more or less in the same relative positions.
It seems both groups have moved horizontally within their social classes, but vertically, the groups seem as distant as, or more distant, than ever. As issues of social mobility are shaking up the developed world, we need to look at issues of social mobility in our own backyard more closely.
According to the 2015 British Social Attitudes Survey by NatCen Social Research organisation, years of austerity and the end of a “golden age” of upward social mobility in late 20th century Britain may have been a major factor in the vote to Brexit. Across the Atlantic in the USA, Grusky and Mitnik, at the Center on Poverty and Inequality, use a new data set provided to them by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to generate an IGE, or an intergenerational elasticity indicator.
An IGE can be between 0 and 1, with 0 representing total economic mobility and 1 representing the absence of it. If IGE is equal to 1, all parental income advantages in a society are passed onto the next generation in the form of higher earnings with no room for social mobility. In the past, estimates of IGE in the United States have ranged from 0.34 to 0.6, but Grusky and Mitnik’s numbers suggest its closer to 0.6. There are many other measures of social mobility, but the message is clear: investments in public education and other programs notwithstanding, the best bet for success is to be born to wealthy parents.
In Sri Lanka, there is little research on social mobility, but the link between education and social mobility is assumed. As a former Prime Minister remarked at a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) forum, “Free education has to a great extent contributed towards social equity and upward social mobility in Sri Lanka. Poverty is no bar to education in Sri Lanka, because not only the schools and the teaching but also books and school uniforms are provided free by the State” (SAARC, 28 March 2009).
Free education may have served the purpose of politicians by keeping up a façade of equality, but it is time to take off our rose-tinted glasses and begin to look at the reality of education and social mobility in Sri Lanka, beginning with a better understanding of issues of social mobility in general.
