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In February 2023, I wrote a piece for Kuppi entitled, The future is female? There I discussed how while most of our undergraduate students were female, the University system was not doing enough to equip them to address the violence and misogyny in our society. In that article, I also illustrated the nature of violence and misogyny that students and young women in general face in our country.

Sri Lankans love their educational qualifications. Qualifications permit envious comparisons of value, similar to the ownership of gold jewellery, an expensive watch or a branded pair of shoes, resulting in exactly the same questions of provenance, worth and authenticity, but from a much higher moral ground.

Recent events surrounding the ABBA tribute concert held in Colombo brought to light certain long-standing questions particularly to do with the arts and the idea of leisure. While I will not pretend that I can capture the spectrum of responses that were offered on the fact that some NPP politicians had attended the concert, I am intrigued by what I thought was a dominant critique. The politicians were viewed as being hypocrites because they came in on a promise of focusing on the most immediate needs of the people and were then seen at a concert, something non-essential to the jobs they were elected to do.

Generative Artificial Intelligence, or GenAI, has been a hot topic, mainly in academic circles, for the past few years, and one of the fields in which GenAI has made ripples is English Language Teaching (ELT). While some have embraced GenAI as a resourceful tool, which could be used to improve the ELT situation, some others have expressed concern regarding the possible negative impact of GenAI in the field. Research conferences are being organized where the intervention of GenAI in ELT is being discussed from multiple angles. Research publications are emerging on the topic turning the field into one of academic enquiry.

Sri Lanka is now at the crossroads with a new regime in formation that has to choose from different social and economic pathways for the country. In the United States, Trump is back with a fascist tide that is likely to sweep the world. In this context, what will become of the long journey of free education in Sri Lanka?

The trend in Sri Lanka after the open economy reforms of the late 1970s has been defunding free education, leading to the slow implosion of the education system. In fact, particularly over the last decade, there has been an insidious project of engineering the failure of state education, in order to create the environment for commercialising education. Privatisation, including fee-levying institutions, are now making education a cash earner – even as students become indebted – and a privilege of the wealthy. In this column, I sketch the ideological underpinnings of education that have to be debated and struggled for, as education, like other social pillars, are confronted with diverging paths ahead.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, at a progress review meeting with the Ministry of Education (among others) earlier in October, emphasised the need to reform the country’s education system to better respond to global needs. This is a reiteration of a longstanding policy commitment, reflecting an equally longstanding oblivion to how this has failed, time and again, to work for us. The ‘global need’ is to integrate every society of the world to the global capitalist market, on the highly unequal terms that were crystallised over the course of Europe’s colonial adventures. In this constellation, developing societies like Sri Lanka are but frontiers of global capitalism, expected to contribute raw material, cheap labour, and sinks for dumping industrial and agricultural waste (including low quality consumer goods that don’t meet the standards expected by high protectionist markets like that of the EU).