When Education For Everyone Excluded Everyone Else
Uditha Devapriya
The second in a series of essays delving into the problems of our education system
It has been pointed out that vernacular education in Sri Lanka predates the Kannangara reforms, an argument that is usually made by those who have an axe to grind with Kannangara and those reforms. It is, of course, a flawed argument, given that while the Morgan Committee was ostensibly concerned with the establishment of vernacular schools this was not done with the aim of providing a decent education for everyone and anyone. Indeed the cost of schooling became so prohibitive that it deterred everyone but the more affluent sections of the rural petty bourgeoisie from attending them. Besides, with the implementation of distance clauses, such schools were shut down if a missionary institution was nearby. They did not teach in English, moreover, which in colonial society was essential in getting to the top.
Antipathy to free education stems from two schools of thought. The first discounts what Kannangara did on the basis that he fuelled an entire generation of chauvinists through an education system differentiated on the basis of language and ethnicity. Kannangara, however, has been vilified like Bandaranaike for the wrong reasons here, because in the original proposals for free education he called for a bilingual education. In a context where less than 5% or 6% of the country spoke English, it was essential not only that Sinhala and Tamil be taught but also that education in swabasha be accompanied by education in the colonial tongue.
It’s ironic that the beneficiaries of free education themselves write against it, but they are preferable to that other school of thought which criticises Kannangara: those who believe that the colonial distinctions between “elite” and “mass” education promoted a nationalism that brought together all the ethnicities of the country. The proponents of this rather strange theory are, to be sure, a dying breed, and their argument rests on the assumption that the educationists who opposed the Kannangara proposals were moved by benign motives and that those proposals, when implemented, fermented rebellion against the elite (which, for these people, is strangely a bad thing).
In that sense, what Canon R. S. De Saram, Warden of S. Thomas’ College and a member of the National Education Committee, once said in a speech in front of Kannangara must be quoted verbatim:
… [i]t would be a pity if criticism should be allowed to degenerate into mere acrimony between those who differ on fundamental problems. Ill temper or partisanship will not solve our difficulties; nor the imposition by decree or otherwise of any one rigid system for all schools. On the contrary, toleration within limits of many varieties of educational practice is indicated by our varying conditions as the right and wise policy.
Note the hostility to any attempt made by the State to impose a uniform standard for all schools. If this argument can be considered valid, it can also be discounted by the simple fact that the State, i.e. the colonial government, had already implemented such a standard, for the vernacular and so-called Central Schools. There were hardly any differences between them, and they were distinguished by the lack of funds and the lack of proper maintenance they had to suffer on account of the government concentrating on the prestigious state and assisted schools.
This is not to say that the colonial government neglected other schools altogether: expenditure on education rose from Rs. 3,465,703 in 1920 to Rs. 12,053,379 in 1930, an increase of almost 250%. But the question to be raised at this point is whether the government was spending enough on schools that needed to be spent on. Even if State schools received a lion’s share of this rise in spending, it received that at a time when education had in effect been made compulsory through Ordinance No. 1 of 1920, which set up a Board of Education and empowered a Director of Education. Sydney Wanasinghe referred to this as “the first comprehensive education Ordinance” in Sri Lanka: it was followed 11 years later by the more democratic Executive Committee on Education that the Donoughmore Constitution created. Kannangara, of course, became the first Chairman of this Committee.
