Friday, January 11, 2019

On Bandula Gunawardane’s Point: The Historical Context

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Uditha Devapriya
The first of a series of essays delving into the problems of our education system
It’s difficult to agree with a person when the point he/she makes is made in a wrong way. And yet, I agree with Bandula Gunawardane. Not because I believe international schools should be shut down, not because I believe that equating students from these schools with those from government/private schools in terms of examination results is wrong, but because the issue he spoke about makes evident some unpalatable truths about our education system. Where I disagree with his contention, of course, is his remedy. As far as the problem goes, I am with him.
In a context where public schools have put pressure on students and parents, it is natural that an alternative education system should crop up to serve the needs of a specific milieu that has either been excluded from or has grown disillusioned with the public sector. This can be traced to three factors: historical, economic, and social. It’s not easy to separate the one from the others, but if we are to dissect the issue, they have to be considered in turn. First and foremost, then, the historical.
Sri Lanka’s education system has mostly run on dualistic lines. When the British brought the country under its rule in 1815, the policy was to prevent the indigenous population from taking part in the administration. Over the years though, thanks to a booming plantation economy, the breakdown of the traditional order, and the need for intermediaries between the elite and locals, this attitude changed, and education, left to the missionaries – the Baptists from 1812, the Wesleyans from 1814, the American Mission from 1816 – was taken up by the government after the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms, because of which a system was developed to be catered, as J. M. Haward the Director of Public Instruction noted in 1904, to “the higher education of the few” over “the elementary education of the many.” This distinction between the many and the few was an integral part of colonial education policy.
The history of education under British rule can be divided into five periods. Each saw that distinction being maintained one way or the other: between 1796 and 1835, when authorities exhibited an attitude of hostility (as with Governor Barnes) or appeasement (as with Governor Brownrigg) towards missionary schools; between 1835 and 1867, when the government took over the running of certain schools and prioritised English education; between 1867 and 1880, when the Morgan Committee reversed this trend and prioritised the establishment of vernacular schools; between 1880 and 1927, when periods of recession followed by growth were reflected in sudden shifts in policy; and between 1927 and 1948, which culminated with the Report of the Special Committee on Education in 1943 and the Education Ordinance of 1947.
It’s clear from this that colonialism separated education into two categories: English and vernacular. The elite schools in the country were artificially transplanted from the public school model in England without taking into account local cultural specifics (roughly the same argument made of international schools now), and the outcome was an “accepted policy of vernacular education for the masses and English education for a small elite.” Education policy thus served two needs: the education of an indigenous elite to serve imperial interests, and the education of the rural child to equip him with the “humble career which ordinarily lies before him.”
The educational divide in the country was geographic and it continues to be reflected in the way academic achievement varies from region to region: in 1883, for instance, average attendance at schools ranged from one in 21 in the Western Province to one in 222 in the North Central Province. From archival documents, we can get an idea as to how legislators viewed and rationalised this rift. Calls had been made since 1799 for an English educated elite to transform the upper echelons of traditional society; over the years English education consequently became the ideal route through which the local elite could capture, retain, and accumulate political power.
By contrast, schools “in the backward rural areas were exclusively vernacular and the rural child had access only to an elementary form of education” (Warnapala 2011: vi). This does not seem to have bothered the colonial administrators: in the 1880s, Bruce’s Revised Education Code, drafted along Lowe’s Revised Education Code of 1860 in England (which codified education for the working class), sought to discourage entry to government English village schools (the mushrooming of which ran counter to the “accepted policy”) by charging high fees and shutting them down whenever there was a missionary school within a distance of two miles (in 1874 the prescribed distance had been three miles; in 1891 it would be brought down to a quarter mile).

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