Kuppi Talk

In a recent Kuppi article by Nicola Perera, “Dealing with Sexual- and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV) in Universities” (18/02/2025), the author discusses the gap between institutional structures and the reality of preventing violence against women and marginalised communities, including the LGBTQ+ community, in Sri Lanka’s higher education sector.

Despite policy interventions at the University Grants Commission (UGC), university, and faculty levels, sexual- and gender-based violence (SGBV) is so entrenched in the system that victim-survivors seeking justice are more likely to experience concerted pushback than the empathetic solidarity of their peers. Colleagues and friends will often close ranks, rallying to protect the accused under misguided notions of safeguarding the reputation of, not merely the assumed perpetrator, but the institution. While gender and sexual inequalities, inflected by class, ethnicity, religion, region, and other characteristics, shape the identities of the perpetrator and victim and the situation of abuse, the hyper-hierarchised nature of the university space itself enables and conceals such violence. It’s also important to note that women are not the exclusive victims of violence; boys and men are caught in violent dynamics, too.

Long before MIT and Jeff Bezos (the latter reluctantly referred to here) had supposedly banned PowerPoint in the classroom or at meetings, I had banned its use in my classes. I wished to live and create a moment of life, and not entice death, death by PowerPoint; a macabre slide-show of misadventure. Its hero, protagonist, or villain, deadly boredom. It is about aliens, made up of quantum particles of ominous signs, bullets and slides, circles and squares, colours that light up on command. It has taken over your mind, got under your skin, and holds you not in a choke hold (too much excitement for PowerPoint), but brings about a paralysis of the body; sleep overtakes one, one slips into another world, while the presentation washes over you.

Reforming Sri Lanka’s education system in ways that cater to global needs appears to be a central focus of the new government. This pronouncement first appeared in the NPP’s election manifesto with reference to vocational education. Later, in October 2024, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake stated that our education system should be rebuilt in alignment with global demands. Prime Minister and Minister of Education Harini Amarasuriya mentioned in a speech in December 2024 that building a skilled workforce capable of meeting the needs of both local and global labour markets is a key objective of the government’s development vision.

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).