What Your Schools Didn’t Teach You
By Thisuri Wanniarachchi –March 12, 2016
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
The culture of fraternity surrounding school Big Matches in Sri Lanka is a reflection of the misogyny and social malnourishment within our education system. Most of us are blind to it, not merely because we are too frenzied by the artificial hype created by these events, to see the deeper social implications they reflect. But because our national school system didn’t teach us how to open up our minds to understand the backward values entrenched in our culture that we continue to hold on to.
#1. First of all: School is only one step of the way. Life doesn’t end there.
It’s only in sri lanka that we’ve seen people stay fraternized to educational institutions from their childhood. Not universities, but schools. In the United States, this culture of fraternity is seen amongst elite universities, Sports play a major role in US universities and is a multi-million dollar industry. The annual Harvard- Yale game, for instance, is one controversial battle of fraternities, and promotes a culture of sporting rivalry. It’s somewhat easier to understand why a culture of fraternity may prevail among these university students; elite universities are extremely competitive, exclusive and promote a certain culture of academic thought that they collectively take pride in. And above all a social culture (sometimes pretentious, sometimes not) that binds them.
But how do we explain such a fraternity existing amongst students of schools? If you take the students of the schools represented in Sri Lanka’s Big Match season: less than 10% of their annual graduates receive entrance into distinguished universities. Is the reason for their return to school annually, to behave as they would have when they were children, an implication that school is as far as most of our population get in life? No, this is not a statement made to degrade the youth or middle-aged men who go to these Big Matches; it’s a fact. Statically speaking, as of now, only 6% of our Sri Lankan youth are in university. A significant number of the students who graduate from these schools remain unemployed/underemployed or end up at low quality mid-way alternative higher education programs that do not fill the gap of the education that their schools failed to give them. A majority of students don’t get the opportunity to learn how to think socially progressively. They remain socially and intellectually backward.
*(Facts and statistics aside, yes we can all agree it is also very demeaning: you attend these schools when you are a child, before you’ve matured into an adult: a time in our lives we treasure quite a lot, but not enough to go back to our sports-meets dressed in our uniforms. I mean, you don’t have to be the coolest kid in the room to agree that fully-grown adults feeling the need to go back to their childhood school every year is a little weird, unless they do so to mock their childhood selves.)
