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The storm's eye by Prof.Rajiva Wijesingha

I have had, in the last few weeks, to mark a number of projects prepared by different groups of students. With very few exceptions, what they do is copy vast chunks of relevant and not so relevant material out of the reference books suggested. If I am lucky they copy correctly, but for the majority leaving out lines or repeating them seems perfectly acceptable.

Getting spelling correct is not to be thought of, even at postgraduate levels. But it is foolish to be surprised. I remember being told, several years ago, by the then Dean of the Law Faculty, that she came back from sabbatical to find that her students demanded that she dictate notes to them. Dictate, she stressed, not lecture, but read out a simplified version of her subject at snail's pace for them to copy down.

And I remembered then that, many years previously, in secondary school, we had a history teacher who dictated notes. In the primary we had text books, and teachers who helped us to read these and talked about the subject. In a few respects teachers were even more interesting as we moved up. But history was especially sad. After one year of this nonsense, I rebelled. I got the previous year's notes from a boy in the class above me, and kept these with me. The teacher realized after a few days that I was not copying the notes he was dictating, but I told him I had them already. He claimed he had changed them since the previous year, but I was able to prove that this was not true, by reading out what he had just been dictating.

After that he left me alone, and I had a much more productive time reading novels in his class. His notes were in fact dreadful, and I soon found much more interesting material in books. The notes, again dictated, of the graduate who taught us at Ordinary Level were better, but again I found that reading books gave me more illuminating perspectives.

I could not understand why the poor man did not get us all to read a couple of these books, which would have helped us to learn much more, without wasting our time.

The middle school master was just plain lazy. But the younger man, the graduate, we found, had difficulties in reading English. He had got his degree by taking down notes. Basically a decent man, he thought the best thing he could do for us was share the distilled essence that his own lecturers at university had provided him with.

Such a waste of time. Such a waste of the intellect, which at that stage should be collecting information from different sources, weighing it up, discriminating, judging. But was this not inevitable, with the switchover to Swabhasha? The chief proponent of the change, J. R. Jayewardene, as I found when I read J. E. Jayasuriya's account of the debate in the State Council at the time, had been much sharper than I generally give him credit for. He had wanted the switchover to Swabhasha to be accompanied by a concerted programme of translation, so that the most advanced materials would be available even to students confined to their mother tongues.

Sharper yes, but not at all practical. What might just have been possible for the humanities could not have been done for the sciences, in which new information was being gathered all the time. And what might have been done 50 years ago soon became impossible, when the pool of those fluent enough in both languages to translate with ease dwindled so swiftly.

Now it would be impossible. Our students then are stuck in the materials of the last generation to read fluently in English. Hence the ridiculous declarations, which training college students have to copy down, that our income derives mainly from tea and rubber and coconut. Hence the rather splendid collection of political thinkers I found enshrined in the syllabus prescribed for our students at Sabaragamuwa, including even John of Salisbury, but not Hayek or Nozick or Rawls.

Can anything be done about this? The Ministry has been talking for ages about a programme to encourage reading, but it has not really thought about the logistics of such a programme. Its main task seems to be the acquisition of vast amounts of funds from international lending agencies that can then be used to order multiple copies of books chosen by officials who would not dream of reading these themselves. Specialist encyclopedias couched in English no one, not even the staff, can readily understand, and 10 copies of each volume for good measure - and probably much larger commissions. The World Bank blithely passes all these indiscriminately.

Now I think our students who are so critical of the World Bank are off the mark, but it is not wickedness and conspiracies they should deduce. It is sheer bloody incompetence, incompetence for which future generations will have to pay endlessly. For the trouble is that World Bank officials are as statist in their approach as the incompetent, corrupt and / or wasteful government officials who have got us into this mess.

The idea that what should be done is the development of a publishing industry based on market forces is not something our statist mindsets can conceive of. The officials make their money while students protest that the private sector is concerned only with profit. At least the private sector takes risks. Government officials don't even run the risk of being caught, because their colleagues will not rock the boat, so complaints are blithely ignored.

India, flourishing with a multitude of books, for all ages and at all prices and language levels, is rapidly leaving us behind. Our distinguished educationists still pride themselves on our literacy rates, without pausing to reflect on what these mean in terms of educational achievement. But if nothing is done soon, this country, that once exported so many teachers, will probably have to start importing them, at prohibitive rates - doubtless funded by the World Bank.

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