On (free) education, issues and disparities

Uditha Devapriya-2016-08-02

Sri Lanka takes pride in being a bastion of free education. There's a whole load of statistics, percentages and numbers put out as evidence for this. Statistics, however, are meaningless if they aren't used to adjust for the future. This week's column is about Sri Lanka's education system, more specifically its primary and secondary sectors. It is an attempt at pointing out disparities, flaws, inefficiencies and solutions which continue to ail the system and what's more, stare at us and demand redress.

Before delving into them at once though, there is a key point to note. When it comes to identifying systemic flaws, the focus should be on the institutions fostered by the system. In particular, schools.
Sri Lanka currently has four kinds of state schools: Type 1AB, Type 1C, Type 2, and Type 3. The first two have classes until the A/Levels, with Type 1AB offering science subjects and Type 1C offering non-science subjects (the latter of these, for reasons which will be pointed at shortly, predominate). Type 2 schools go on until the O/Levels, while Type 3 schools don't proceed beyond Year Five or Eight.

Type 3 schools

Not surprisingly, Type 3 schools are in the majority. They are located everywhere and are not just concentrated in urban areas. They tend to attract those who can't "make it" to the top tier, while the brightest among them are sent up through either the Year Five scholarship exam or the Year Eight final exam. Naturally, both these exams (together with the O/Levels) are considered very competitive and are seen as stepping stones to the top tier, which is why Type 3 are sometimes colloquially referred to as "feeder schools."

The fact that some of these schools, even within the Colombo District, don't teach English as a subject until Year Three (at which point the student ironically is taught from the Year Three textbook, the assumption being that he would have gone through Years One and Two on his own) indicates certain glaring resource-deficiencies.The top tier, conversely, consists of Type 1 and Type 2 schools, which, in a manner of speaking, have the best and get the best.

This fourfold differentiation, in the final analysis, has tended to increase social and economic inequalities in a way that was not intended by those who scripted such a differentiation into our education system. There are reasons for it, obviously.

The 1971 and 1988 insurrections showed structural flaws in our education system. They included the lack of any visible connection between qualifications and employability. In the years following Independence, for instance, a liberal arts curriculum (with an emphasis on unemployable and un-professional subjects from the Arts stream) could be sustained by amenable economic conditions, but an education of that sort couldn't flourish in a context where the country needed to be industrialized to keep up with the rest of the world.

Regional disparities
Have we realised this even now? Regional disparities would suggest that we have not. Urban schools are better equipped. Rural schools, on the other hand, are not. Consequently, non-urban schools suffer when it comes to "hard" subjects such as Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Maths, which means that students outside urban areas rarely go for such subjects. Even if they do, one can contend, they don't have enough facilities to get through exams.

And in a large way, this explains certain sobering statistics. In 2014, nearly 10,400 failed their O/Levels. The highest failure rate was in the Moneragala District, reputed to be one of the most unequal in the country. In the previous year, for instance, it recorded a Ginicoefficient (the standard measure of economic inequality today) of 0.53, the highest in the country. Free education would seem not to have done away with disparities and would seem to have a link with the income gap.

Not that there isn't a flipside, of course. Free education has its merits. Our transition rate, or proportion of students enrolled in Grade Six against those enrolled in Grade Five, is commendably high for a developing country (at 102 per cent), as is our literacy rate. The government provides nearly everything, from textbooks to uniforms to scholarships to even food (whether these are adequate quality-wise is debatable). Structures and policies have done away with gender differentials to a discernible extent (whereby girls are actually less likely than boys to "drop out"). And above everything, the system has emancipated the most underprivileged in our society and encouraged social mobility.

Going by this therefore, the problems in the sector don't lie with the student alone. They lie with the teacher and administration as well.
Influential book
In his influential book "My Larger Education" Booker T. Washington observed that an education system which catered to an "elitist" minority would eventually hinder the ability of a community to advance socially in the long term. He also observed that the liberal arts tradition, with its emphasis on the arts over more practical subjects such as agriculture and carpentry, falsely promised students a future they couldn't claim owing to the mismatch between qualification and employment in what they studied.
The other day I was talking to a teacher who more or less affirmed what Washington said more than a century ago. The teacher, a principal and a veteran with 28 years behind her, began by arguing that her profession lacks qualified graduates today. I prompted her to explain.
"Before teachers are appointed, they must be 'qualified', by which I am not talking about Diplomas only. They must be productive and must be capable of teaching more than one subject. In my day, for instance, we were required to enter what was called the 'purvasevya guru puhunuwa' or Pre-Service Teacher Training, where we picked up several disciplines and because of which we were able to look through any syllabus and absorb it quickly. That was unfortunately done away with later on, a pity by all accounts."

Unreceptive to demands
I asked her as to whether this explains why teachers today are felt to be unreceptive to the demands of the student, and she agreed. "We come across teachers who are unable to identify the needs and abilities of their students. That's a problem, because we can't salvage this profession if we aren't alert to those we teach."

What about the curriculum? "I'd say that it's obsessed over injecting knowledge into the student. There's little to no room for anything else. The teachers, in their rush to finish an overwhelming syllabus, are consequently unable to pay enough attention to the student. This does away with the relationship between the two so much that the student is forced to resort to tuition. True, there's less emphasis on rote studying now, but despite that we still see a gap between a subject and its employment potential in terms of skills obtained."

What of the dichotomy between popular and non-popular schools, a virtual motif in our education discourse? "That has sustained disparities between the rural and the urban student, which is undesirable. I can see two ways of engaging with this. One, you can set up new schools. Two, you can restructure existing schools. I believe in the first method. Build more science labs, computer labs, even playgrounds and swimming pools. Build them in a meaningful way and disparities will eventually crowd out. The issue, let's not forget, is largely to do with inputs: facilities, classrooms, and teachers."

The Ministry of Education recently unveiled a new programme titled "Langama Pasala, HondamaPasala" (the nearest school is the best school). It speaks for itself, but would it make sense without a corresponding drive to provide facilities and labs to existing Type 2 and Type 3 schools?

Combating elitism
The government should take stock of lessons learnt in the past, no matter how well intended their programmes may be at present. To give one example, despite its attempts at combating the elitism spawned by the differentiation of our schools, the most that past administrations could do was open up schools categorized as "Navodaya" and "Isuru", which as that teacher cautiously argued did very little in achieving the goals set for them. Clearly then, officials and administrators must think beyond programme-name if they are to obtain tangible results.

No industry or sector "owned" by the government (and owned by the people) can hope for perfection. There are degrees of perfection, however. There are a number of points we can be proud about and a number of points we can be humbled when it comes to our education system.

What of the "free" in free education, though? Some will argue that it's a misnomer. What's free in a system where economic disparities have become a norm, they'll ask. The argument is stark and lends itself to easy simplification, but at one level it makes sense.
And it's not hard to see why. The differentiation of schools into four broad categories did as much harm as good. The top tier has and gets the best. The bottom tier does not. Factoring in the tendency of teachers and parents to "target" the best and the discernible trend of "outstation" schools and students to opt out of employment-oriented subjects such as science means that the system has managed to sustain disparities while maintaining a façade of equality (whereby the top tier is as freely provided for as the bottom in terms of "education at no cost"). This is an irony and an indictment on us, I believe.

Social inequalities
On the other hand however, no one can contend that free education was misplaced. It did away with many of the social inequalities perpetuated by colonial administrations. In the end it helped the country clinch literacy rates, transition rates, and retention rates which surpass our neighbours. The only problems we can point out, hence, are structural flaws that can be dealt with in two ways: by reforming our schools and by reforming our curriculum. The solution lies somewhere there. I hope.