Kuppi Talk

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).

With government change and cautious hope in the air, I thought I would allow myself to dream, to hope for a different world, in the way we view education. First, however, I begin with some hard questions about practicalities that are vital to the welfare of our students and teachers and to the functioning of the educational system as a whole: why is it that food insecurities among students remain unaddressed in the midst of this crisis? Why was reintroducing the school midday meal programme delayed so long? Where are the initiatives to curtail rising self-harm among students?

These are new times indeed. The country is in a celebratory mood. We have a brand new President, and a brand new Prime Minister, who would both enjoy an anticipated majority in Parliament – a government that has infused the people with much hope. Though we have not seen a decisive victory for the new President, the country has woken up to the remarkable change the Presidential election has ushered. The times are also critical. This is the first election after the protests of 2022 – the Aragalaya-Porattam-Struggle movement. Since independence we have seen a see-sawing between two traditional parties, the UNP and the SLFP and their offshoots, coalitions, etc. In Dissanayake, we have a completely new face, a new class of face, a new ethos of politics in the promise that corruption will be eliminated from the practice of governance.

Reading the manifestos of presidential candidates in the run-up to the elections, many search for hope for the future. Studying the content in the manifestos on higher education, I soon realised that they engage little with the ‘real’ subjects that occupy my thoughts, for instance, the everyday challenges of those working in the Sri Lankan university system. These include the endless responsibilities of an academic, the desire to engage in impactful research amidst pressures of having to ‘produce’ and ‘publish’, balancing excessive administrative loads with teaching and research, addressing numerous issues of students, coping with everyday interactions of academic, non-academic staff, administrators, and striving to co-create a meaningful learning experience.

I recently had the opportunity to read Sari Andapu Pirimi (‘Men Draped in Sarees’) by Vishnu Vasu, a powerful narrative that sheds light on the lived experiences of the LGBTQ+ community in Sri Lanka. Through personal stories of discrimination, within families, in society, and by the country’s legal framework, the book offers a heart-rending look into the systemic marginalization faced by individuals who do not conform to the country’s dominant heteronormative norms.

I teach in a postgraduate programme on gender and health offered by the Faculty of Medicine, Colombo. In the module I coordinate on gender-responsive healthcare, we discuss, among other things, the experience of LGBTIQ+ persons within the health sector. The situation is quite bleak. According to the activists who teach in the module, most health professionals lack basic training on delivering sex-/gender-responsive health services. A 2023 study carried out by EQUAL GROUND in six districts (Colombo, Galle, Jaffna, Kandy, Matale, Polonnaruwa) describes varied experiences of stigmatization, discrimination, verbal/physical abuse and sexual harassment in the hands of healthcare providers.

We often perceive the public university as a space for intellectual inquiry and knowledge production. While our discussions generally revolve around the academic contribution made by universities and how the education they offer could be improved, we do not lay enough emphasis on the reality that universities are also spaces created out of work and labour and that the welfare and wellbeing of all those who work there is important to the functioning of the system. Sadly, our universities are riddled with divisions and hierarchies.

Panduka Karunanayake’s article “Education’s ‘Three E’s’ and the McUniversities: Some Heretical Thoughts” published in the University of Colombo Review (2021, volume 2 issue 1) swiftly traces the emergence of ‘McUniversities’, where the goal of educating has been changed to be more ‘efficient’, using the Weberian concept of instrumental rationality. This model might increase efficiency, but only at the cost of some important principles. In other (my) words, what seems to matter more, is that a student may graduate sooner, with a sellable qualification but the question of whether he/she has acquired any moral or socio-political values at university becomes immaterial.

In her Kuppi Talk article “The dispossession of a voice through English in Sri Lanka” (6 February 2024), Selvaraj Vishvika delves into the myriad troubles that accompany the imposition of standards on the English language learner in Sri Lanka. Chief among her reflections is the sordid reality every ELT (English language teaching) practitioner must face at some point: that we do in fact disallow for learners’ expression of ideas when we get myopic about maintaining ‘standards’. Extending this argument further, Maduranga Kalugampitiya (“Positioning the idea of Sri Lankan English in the field of English language teaching in Sri Lanka”, published 2 April 2024) argues that a realistic standard should necessarily be one that contextualises itself to its locality, allowing for users to adapt it to their circumstances.

Free education is one of the strongest pillars of our society. In this column, I address the consequences for the education sector, after Sri Lanka’s first-ever default on its external debt and the IMF’s arbitration of debt restructuring with the country’s external creditors.