A couple of years back, at a workshop on graduate employability (sponsored by World Bank loans), we were told that producing graduates was like producing cars. The buyers – potential employers – want to know what they are getting. Let’s consider this analogy at face value. We would then remember that the quality of a car depends on not one but multiple things, of which labour is a significant issue, as the Michigan automobile industry realized last year.
The Ministry of Education (MoE), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institute of Education (NIE) jointly organised an event on 31 March 2023 at Royal College, Colombo. At the event, the Minister of Education, Dr. Susil Premajayantha, announced that the government was planning to transform the country’s education system starting 2024 by introducing “STEAM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) education. STEAM is distinct from “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), which was promoted earlier by the government, with the NSF as the designated national focal point.
Sri Lanka’s seventeenth IMF agreement sealed last week may well prove to be the most devastating one of them all. The reason is that the agreement comes along with Sri Lanka having defaulted on its external debt for the first time in its history. The IMF amounts to being the arbiter of the debt restructuring process with Sri Lanka’s external creditors, which will provide considerable leverage for Sri Lanka to be held accountable to IMF conditionalities.
In Gunadasa Amarasekara’s novel Inimage Ihalata (Up the Ladder), Piyadasa – a young undergraduate from a rural background – has an epiphany while watching the daily deva puja at Katharagama. Initially attracted to the pulsating rhythm of the dancers he feels a strong erotic impulse.
Statistics from the University Grants Commission (UGC) for 2020 show that out of 109,660 students that constituted the UGC intake for the year, 64.3 % were female. The preponderance of female students exists across disciplines with Engineering , Technology, and Computer Science being the only disciplines with larger male populations.
We, the citizens, were erased from the Independence Day ceremony, presided over by the supreme civil and military leadership of the state, at Galle Face. This was a far cry from last year, when this same space became the site of mass protests, as a collective expression of our agency, solidarity, and anger.
Sri Lanka is trapped in debt due to decades of corruption and short-sighted economic policies. To come out of the trap or, I would say, escape the moment, the government is seeking loans from the IMF, or anybody else who is willing to lend, no matter the conditions. To this end, under the IMF’s tutelage, the government is seeking to privatise education, aware that it will face the wrath of the people.
As Sri Lanka tumbles further into the abyss of economic misery, pressure on state universities to focus more on quality assurance (QA) increases, supposedly to justify the ‘strain’ they are placing on the public purse. QA purportedly seeks to improve the ‘quality’ of education that state universities deliver, by ensuring certain generalised standards are met and maintained, and extensive documentation is considered evidence of such.
This short piece is based on an anecdote of a striking memory that I have of a particular classroom at the Faculty of Arts, University of Peradeniya. Every time I walk past this particular classroom, it triggers the same memory and it has still not weathered. In this piece, I look back on this memory self-critically, in an attempt to understand my own self and analyze my thought process at the time of this incident.
The year 2022 draws to a close, a year that has been the hardest and the most glorious of the past 10 years. It has been the year of exploding gas cylinders, the fertiliser ban and women rising against micro finance. It has been the year of long queues. It is when Colombo erupted in protest as millions converged in its centres, and the President fled the country: the year of the Aragalaya and the year of the Poraattam and the Struggle. It is a year of victories, big and small.
