By Sivamohan Sumathy
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.
Prime Minister and the Endeavour of Education
If Anura Kumara Dissanayake is the face of a new ethos (to be) , the face of Harini Amarasuriya is even more captivating. With a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh, and an academic who was formerly attached to the Open University of Sri Lanka, Amarasuriya’s appointment is a cause for further celebration. She is just the third woman Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, the two previous ones being a mother and daughter duo belonging to the powerful family of the Bandaranaikes. Her work on gender, women’s rights, and other related issues buoy up our expectations even further. She brings to the governing table, a dedicated activist engagement, most particularly in education. And she’s our new Minister of Education. The importance of this cannot be overstated.
Amarasuriya, most pronouncedly belongs to the heyday of the activist adventures of FUTA; the extraordinary events of the 2012 FUTA’s campaign for 6% GDP for Education and its history making 100 days of trade union action. Amarasuriya and I worked together, along with many others, even before the heady days of 2012. As members of the informal and ad-hoc committee of activists, called University Teachers for Democracy and Dialogue, we were one of the first activist groups in education to raise the banner of Save State Universities against the erosion of Free Education in higher education. Our campaigns focused on the onset of the rapid programme of neo liberalization brought on by the World Bank-led governing elite, administrators and Colombo-based think tanks.
In the aftermath of FUTA’s 2012 Trade Union Action, Amarasuriya became the Secretary of FUTA, and actively campaigned for change in the Yahapalana Good Governance campaigns of 2014 -15. She was a key figure in the fact-finding commission appointed by the President in 2015 toward the making of a new Constitution. This commission emphasized social and economic rights of the people among other concerns. With this history, one would expect the Minister of Education to advance the cause of Free Education.
The Mandate
We, in academic activist circles, have been fighting, often, a lonely and bitter battle to preserve Free Education, not in its pristine form, but in its basic promise of delivering a message of hope to the people. As we in Kuppi have demonstrated, time and again, Free Education has been one of the very few avenues of social mobility in the country for the majority of the poor and working populations. With hope one turns to the NPP’s election campaign manifesto. The commitment to Free Education is emblazoned in the first pages of the Manifesto. It begins with a demonstration of the critical importance of education in
the formation of the nation’s psyche and the nation’s health.
In general, there is no manifest departure from the policies of previous governments. At its best, it offers a holistic view of the society it envisages. The emphasis on delivery of education that is more equitable in primary and secondary education is laudable. The programme seeks to address the long felt need to make schools more accessible and schooling more relevant to social needs. The emphasis on rural and provincial schools is indeed important. Making schooling easier and accessible in primary education has been a long felt need, and the manifesto seeks to address it. Age-appropriate sex education is a measure many have fought for long and hard. A holistic civic education where one learns about religions rather than one’s “own” and learns about diversity is wholly welcome. The promise to raise teachers’ salaries to a considerable degree will bestow upon the entire profession a dignity that has disappeared from the social scene. It is not just a matter of empowering the teachers that is of importance here, but also the matter of raising awareness of how critical the field of education is.
Trouble in the House of Free Education
While I have praised some of the changes that the NPP-government has signed up to, there are others that give us pause; make us rethink our evaluation of the government’s programme. Free Education, as we know it, is the linchpin of democratic action. In this regard, NPP’s manifesto offers hope in the most general sense and simultaneously, with one stroke of the pen, undoes it. In the election manifesto, the pledge to advance the principle of Free Education as a function of Education is overshadowed by the trending call of Elimination of Corruption that has shaped NPP’s campaign for the last year or so. This has overshadowed and over-shaped its economic policy, too, allowing it to get away scot-free from taking any responsibility for its equivocation on the IMF package. The singular focus on anti-corruption has become so trendy that the public has come to believe in it as a magic pill that will pull us out of the the economic morass we are in. today. This is patent in the way its Higher Education reforms are drawn, particularly where Free Education as a principle is understood and anticipated.
University education is in the crosshairs of privatization and NPP’s policy does little to assure us of a reversal. In the first few lines in the section on Higher Education, A thriving Nation, A Beautiful Life (p.13, https://www.npp.lk/up/policies/en/npppolicystatement.pdf), one sees the drift toward privatization. Somewhat opaque in meaning, the opening statement lays bare the way NPP defines the framework for Higher Education:
The new university will be transformed into centers providing advanced theoretical and experimental education. Efforts will also be made to establish a parallel university system that provides international-level advanced professional knowledge
It advocates a dual mode of delivery of Higher Education, one public and state owned, which comes under what we understand as Free Education, and the other, a state-owned or state-sponsored privatized education. More bewildering is the clause that promises to grant 200 students, post-high school, scholarships to study in foreign universities (p. 14).
And, Ah, yes, one other clause has kept me awake at night and this has to do with streamlining students according to skills and abilities at the early ages of 13-14 (p. 11). Vocational training and skills- development are those areas in education that have gained quite some traction in recent times. In today’s political culture, riddled with economic and social crises, the politics of social justice has veered toward the idea of employability and the creation of jobs. This policy move of the NPP may gain wide spread social acceptance, for repeated economic crises, resulting in a dearth of jobs in middle management in state and corporate sectors have given way to heightened insecurity about one’s chances at having a viable livelihood. We need a skilled labour force and not unemployable graduates, is how the argument goes. Few contest this view and I,too, dare not. However, one needs to raise some alarm bells here against the too easy acceptance of such provisions that can normalize class and other social divisions. One has to pose the question, in general terms, about who will be streamlined into the vocational sector and who will “progress” toward academic disciplines.
A Renewal
We are no longer at the crossroads of Free Education. Privatisation is no longer an external force for us in the university system. It is insidiously and invidiously here, amongst us. I come back to Harini Amarasuriya and the days of activism we engaged in, in our fight against SAITM, the opprobriousness of Public Private Partnerships, and the resultant weakening of state universities. At the darkest hour for free education, and in anticipation of darker hours, we need to act with courage; pledge our continued support for Free Education, and be the radical actor that the moment calls us to be.
