Whither Education in Sri Lanka

From a Retired Teacher

(January 04, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Now that the schools are closed for vacation after a tedious year and the new school year is about to start it is high time that the minister of education and the authorities concerned ponder on the drawbacks, mistakes and failures in the field of education during the past year and take action to rectify them.

Looking back at 2008, we cannot call it a successful year education wise. Many factors contributed to this pathetic situation. To begin with text books issued to the children were not distributed on time. This included children in Grade 11, and to add insult to injury, most of the books had many mistakes. I suppose the students have received most of their books for 2009 by now.

The year-end examinations conducted by the government were a real hodge-podge. Most of the papers leaked before the exam, and there were many mistakes in the question papers with some examination centres receiving the question papers long after the time set for the commencement of the examination. In some centres the number of question papers received were not sufficient.

In some schools the children hadn’t received their year-end examination marks, which they’ll get only at the beginning of the new academic year — i.e. January 5, when invariably they will be in a new class. The answer scripts should have been given out and the answers discussed so that the children would have known where they had gone wrong.

Another problem faced by the authorities is that there are too many students in a class, sometimes more than 50 and it is humanly impossible for a teacher to go through the written work and correct them all. As a result the students go on making the same mistake over and over again.

This is worse where the subject of English is concerned. This is one reason for the big number of failures in English at the O/L exam. Even the Science and Maths results have been atrocious. The number of students who had passed in Maths and Science at this exam was 57% and 52% respectively.

A shocking revelation made by the Education Department is that about 90% of the teachers in the Central Province are unqualified. In most of the other provinces too it is the same situation. If this is the case how can one expect good results at the end of the year?

A teacher should be qualified to go in front of a class to impart his or her knowledge to the students with confidence. I wonder how these unqualified teachers were recruited to service in the first place.

The standard of English in Sri Lanka is terrible, but still students have only five periods of English a week in the timetable. Most of the children come from homes where English is not spoken and hence are handicapped.

It was heartening to hear that year 2009 has been declared year of English and Information Technology, and a special committee has been appointed to work on it.
A few government schools have started teaching some subjects in English. This will not be fruitful until and unless there are teachers who are competent to teach these subjects in English. So the immediate solution should be to train as many teachers in English as possible without scrapping the teaching of these subjects in English as suggested by the JVP.

The Education Ministry’s latest hodge-podge is the new syllabus O/L Maths paper II. A lot has been brought to light by the print and electronic media. As usual everyone is passing the blame to someone else. They will somehow save their skin with their lame excuses but it is the innocent students who will have to suffer. The people at the top such as the minister of education, his officials and the commissioner of examinations are passing the blame on others.

Over to you Minister of Education. Please take the necessary measures immediately to put an end to this grave situation without playing with the future of this country. - Sri Lanka Guardian