EDUCATION-SRI LANKA: Innovative Schools For New Millennium

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Jan 12 1999 (IPS) - For the first time since Sri Lanka’s independence, school education is being radically overhauled to produce students equipped with skills to meet the challenges of the new millennium.

The education reforms designed after a long and exhaustive study by the government’s National Education Commission (NEC) under its chairman Prof. Lakshman Jayathilake were introduced on Jan. 8.

Prof. Jayathilake described the changes as “very radical” and was optimistic they would lead to the development of “world standard human beings”.

Though Sri Lanka has a high literacy rate of 90 percent, studies show that some children can’t read, write or do simple arithmetic. Only 14 percent of students in grade five, 10 year olds, and 26 percent of grade seven students got the right answer when asked to divide 812 by 4, according to a NEC survey.

There are also major changes in the curricula, syllabus, teachers’ guides and textbooks. Coloured textbooks, meant to attract students, replace the former black and white ones while teachers have been trained to be more innovative in the classroom

Excited NEC officials said the results of a pilot project in Gampaha district, near Colombo, where the reforms were tested last year, showed absenteeism among teachers had significantly dropped and they were enthused by the reforms.

Sweeping changes have been introduced from grade one, and go up to grade 13 or the final year at school, and concentrate on developing practical education skills instead of the earlier rote-learning in schools.

In higher grades, children are expected to undertake practical projects facilitated by the setting up of “activity rooms” in the schools itself.

A new subject called ‘science & technology’, which has replaced science, give children the option of starting at work instead of seeking university education when they leave secondary school.

Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga, in a statement last week, said the reforms would bring about changes in developing mental and general basic abilities, and healthy attitudes and values in children.

In the first few years at school, the focus would be on a mix of both pupil-centred learning (where children are allowed to do whatever they want) and teacher-centred learning (in which the child is a passive listener). Earlier, Sri Lanka had a teacher- centred system.

Children will be encouraged to be active participants, with the freedom to ask any number of questions and make suggestions, instead of only memorising or taking laborious notes.

“We want to make learning more interesting, allow the children more freedom in the classroom and also teach them some skills. That is the focus of these reforms,” Prof. Jayathilake said.

The last major changes were made in the 1940s by C.W.W. Kannangara, then minister of education, who made education from primary to university levels accessible to all by making it free. A network of schools were set up across the country. Earlier the only schools were small “pirivenas” (centres of learning) run by Buddhist monks or schools set up by Christian missionaries.

The Commission or NEC was set up in 1991 on a recommendation of a Presidential Commission on Youth, which heard complaints from the public including rural youth about the lack of reasonable educational opportunities. It was felt that education could resolve many of the social ills plagueing the country.

“There has been a general decline in our values over the past few decades. Inter-personal relationships have deteriorated. There is much cut-throat competition even among very young children,” Jayathilake said in an interview.

“Students were just cramming for examinations, just to pass them but were not gathering knowledge and later they were unable to work in or adjust to different situations,” he explained.

Stressing that there is nothing wrong with healthy competition, he referred to a World Bank report that analyses competitiveness as being viewed in the context of a nation being competitive rather than each individual having a “man-eat-man” attitude.

More than 200 experts – medical professionals like psychologists, nutritionists and also academics, teachers and

politicians from different parties – were consulted by the Commission, which took six years to finalise the reforms.

In a bid to educate the parents of some 370,000 six-year-old children who entered grade one, officials from the NEC have been criss-crossing the country, explaining the changes and their significance.

Jayathilake said the reforms were essential as schools had become a means of getting a paper qualification. Surveys show a drop out rate of 14 percent among students between five and 14 years and the main reason cited was lack of interest. He is hopeful innovative learning would change all that.