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The Storm's Eye by Prof.Rajiva Wijesinghe

In an increasingly bleak world, I had a moment of quiet satisfaction last week at the Convocation of our University. I dislike formal occasions intensely, and have indeed avoided two of the four convocations we have held so far. This time however, having been persuaded by the students last year into taking on the Dean's responsibilites again, I had to attend.

And I was indeed quite proud of them. When these students came they had known little English, and it had been a battle to insist that they do the entire foundation course in the English medium. My successor, who belonged to the independence generation and had a predilection for Sinhala, though with excellent English herself, had tried off and on to change things.

Indeed I think I took over just in time, because having introduced essentially history for Sri Lankan Studies, instead of the multi-disciplinary more modern foundation course we had before (and which the students wanted restored, despite finding it comparatively tough), she had also permitted questions to be answered in Sinhala.

This was I believe the thin end of the wedge. It was also unfair, because we cannot extend the same concession to Tamil students, whose English to begin with is even worse, given how appallingly education has deteriorated in much of the peninsula during the war years. Indeed, one particularly happy moment on Friday was when a boy called Prabhagaran who had known scarcely any English when he came to us back in 1999, introduced me to his parents, who had come all the way from Jaffna for the convocation. He told me that, though he had no job as yet, he was giving English tuition up in the peninsula, and had a ready clientele.

The parents seemed deeply appreciative, of my work in this regard I should if immodestly note, as were those of others I spoke to. I had avoided the formal tea with the Council, since I could meet all of them later, but for many of the students and their parents, it would be the last chance. And universities after all are about students, as my old tutor used constantly to insist. He was deeply conservative and a strict disciplinarian, but though we disagreed continuously on politics, I have tried to model myself on him in my approach to students.

Last Friday, exactly a week after I had had dinner in Oxford with him and his wife, now well into their eighties, but still continuing the kindnesses they had shown to a rather lost 17 year old over 30 years ago, I felt I had to some extent at least lived up to the standards he had set.

For I do not think the English programme would have succeeded had it not been for me. When I came back to teach at Peradeniya in 1980, I found that English at university was confined to those who had done Advanced Level English. Since this was a course based on relatively sophisticated literature, it was done in just a few urban schools, and so there were very few students for English at the three universities which offered it. They all had lots of staff, the highest staff student ratio in the country in fact at Peradeniya, and justified it on the grounds that they were producing English teachers for the country. But in actual fact their very sophisticated graduates rarely went into the teaching profession, and certainly not to rural schools.

Out of the university system, working for the British Council, and encouraged to look into English Language Teaching in addition to the Arts and Literature work for which I had joined, I realized how sad the system was. So I accepted Arjuna Aluwihare's invitation to help with the large scale English tertiary level courses he planned through the Affiliated University Colleges he set up in 1992, when he was Chairman of the UGC. The products of those courses, many of whom went on to a degree when the AUCs became universities, are now amongst the best English teachers in rural schools around the country.

Having started the job, I had to move to the University of Sri Jayawardenepura to coordinate the AUC English course when the person who began it emigrated to Australia. But I was also then able at USJP to introduce English language as a degree subject in addition to literature.

And the latter in fact was begun from basics, so that it could be offered by students who did not have Advanced Level English. Last year, in response to a request we made from the Ministry when I was coordinating English there, Jayewardenepura also introduced English Language Teaching into its external degree programme, which makes that course ideal for teachers all over the country looking for professional development. Unfortunately our attempts to train trainers for this in rural areas has been stymied by the lethargy that has taken over the Ministry since Tara de Mel left, but at least the programme is in place for anyone who wants it.

The Sabaragamuwa University English graduates are of course in great demand already. I wanted one to work at the university to help with the pre-university GELT course that has been revived this year, but it turns out he has already been offered a more interesting job with a book distributor. Others are teaching on an innovative programme in the Mahaweli area begun by the Director of our Extension Unit. The restrictions lobby in the university raised protests about this, claiming indeed that they had the support of the Chairman of the UGC to suspend activity on the programme. But since such attempts to broaden the supply of education are in line with current thinking, I cannot imagine anyone except the most intense of control freaks trying to stymie such an excellent use of resources.

And it is not only our English graduates. I was asked recently by the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Colombo, surely the highest of the high in academic terms, why the Tharuna Aruna programme had rated our students much higher than hers. Of course there may be other reasons, but all I could suggest with regard to our Faculty was the compulsory English medium foundation course that develops reference skills through library activity, thinking skills through problem solving, and inculcates a broad general knowledge such as our school system no longer provides. And reading through the souvenir produced by the students when they left, in which they recorded their happiest moment, I found references to the day students were permitted to offer their main course in the English medium.

So that one can count as success - extending opportunities in English to students who had no such chance before, and ensuring that they were confident enough to grasp these opportunities. But at the same time, as I said at the start, life looks bleaker than ever. I fear the attempt to help on a larger scale, in terms of the school English medium programme I began earlier this year, is going to end in disaster. Production of materials has been stopped, and though the NIE is reported to have taken this over, schools have still not received books for the third term. Training of teachers, which we did very successfully for three months, was stopped in February, and was only resumed six months later by the NIE in a very different manner.

The net result is that schools which already have some competence, the big urban ones, will continue while rural schools will fall by the wayside.

English then will again become an instrument of division, instead of the leveller that provides opportunities for all, as it did through Kannangara's great innovation of Central Schools as good as those in the capital. Sometimes I feel that this is what the independence generation that is so concerned with Sinhala, to the exclusion of both English and Tamil, really want. Their own children after all have English. Those who would have competed against them, from Jaffna as well as our rural areas, no longer have the required competencies. And so the new elite will continue unchallenged, as it does in the underdeveloped regions of the world, while the new Tigers (I mean Singapore etc, not Eelam - or not yet, at any rate) streak ahead.

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