Education & Reconciliation; The Sri Lanka Case
By S. Sandarasegaram –May 26, 2016
Prof. S. Sandarasegaram
Education is considered as panacea for most of the social ills. It is also considered as a powerful weapon in ameliorating the problems such as unemployment, pollution, national disintegration, population explosion, increase in crimes, aids and the list is lengthy. Discourse on establishing social cohesion and reconciliation in Sri Lanka is full of suggestions pertaining to educational reforms and strategies and the educational policy makers are very much concerned about focusing their attention on the four million children enrolled in the school system because this target group is easily approachable through the means of state schools and the national curriculum which are almost compulsory for them.
The sixteen million people who are not in schools and a fraction of them are enrolled in higher educational institutions are not very much touched by these educational policies for reconciliation but those 90000 students enrolled in the state university system are to some extent taken into account through social cohesion projects, thanks to the generous funding policies of the international agencies. These projects do not reach thousands of students enrolled as students in the external degree programs conducted by the state universities and the students enrolled in the hundreds of private institutions of higher education providing courses of foreign universities. Apart from these students, the general public are not properly brought within the purview of the educational policies aiming at bringing about reconciliation in the country. As easily said the print and electronic media, agencies for non-formal education and non-governmental organizations working along these lines and even the political parties have the responsibility to promote the gospel of reconciliation and social cohesion among the general public. If we do not have state sponsored educational programmes to reach these out-of school population all attempts at bringing about reconciliation through education will only have limited impact on the realization of the noble objective. But in this paper attention will be paid only to the role of the formal system of school education in promoting reconciliation and social cohesion.
While it is possible to incorporate some principles and material in the school curriculum pertaining to reconciliation and social cohesion and make arrangements for intermingling of students from different ethnic communities in the school system one has to study whether these measures alone could bring about reconciliation in the absence of measures necessary for removing all grievances expressed and experienced by the minority communities. In other words there are serious concerns entertained by the minorities which need to be addressed as an important component of reconciliation. Any member of the Tamil minority will talk about the presence of military in the North, incarceration of unspecified number of Tamil prisoners without any trial, delay in releasing lands to the legitimate owners in the North, non-implementation of language provisions enshrined in the Constitution and reluctance to devolve power to the Provincial Councils. Reforms in school education can inculcate relevant values to live in a multicultural society to the new generation of people who are not fully aware of Implications of the grievances listed above and they (the reforms) would not have any impact on the adult population finding ways of expressing their real or perceived grievances. Whether the values taught by the school system is reaching the family or larger community from which the children come is another question to be studied.
