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by Dr. Dushyanthi Hoole, and Dr. S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole

Sri Lanka's universities take in the best of our high school students. A top class US graduate school expects a Graduate Record Exam (GRE) normalized score better than 1200 out of 1600 (from the 800 maximum each for the quantitative and the verbal parts. These are rough figures and to keep things simple we are ignoring the analytical component). These expectations for the components vary from faculty to faculty but the averages are about right.

Our best engineering students, with some notable exceptions from multicultural schools, typically get close to 800 in the quantatitative part and usually less than 300 and closer to 250 in the verbal part. With a total of less than 1100 they usually cannot get into the second tier of prestigious schools either. Some either pay fees or go to US schools where they have contacts, prove themselves there, and then move up. The arts faculties are worse off because their scores are usually worse in both components since most of them study in their mother-tongue with no vast literature to read. Our best students therefore increasingly go to less prestigious programmes in countries that do not ask for the GRE, reversing the trend of the past 2 decades of going to good US schools on full scholarship.

At the same time, those who do not enter the university here and of lower but sound intelligence, go abroad either paying fees or as refugees, where they get a more balanced education. With a 600/600 balanced GRE profile, they then get into good graduate schools. Is this fair? What has gone wrong? Don't our best students deserve better?

Education is meant to make us educated. Educated persons, as defined in the many international agreements we have signed, are well-read, cultured persons who are respectful towards others and living in social harmony while being active members of society. A person who does mathematics and more mathematics and little else is no educated person. It explains why our universities have failed. Even we staff are uneducated because we cannot write. So we cannot produce scholarship. In the end as we age, we are even technically uneducated through obsolescence.

What we need is a liberal education. The Chambers Dictionary defines liberal as broadminded and defines it in the context of education as not specialised or technical, aiming at general culture. This understanding of true education that is rooted in generations of experience requires our conceding that we, the teachers, do not know everything and that our choices may be wrong. Accordingly where even specialized education is required, a minimum component is devoted to general studies. Thus in a British engineering programme, 20-25% of the courses would be in the humanities while in the US it would be 25-33%. In a US medical or law programme, recognizing that doctors, and lawyers need to be educated persons first, a general degree is required as a pre-requisite for doing the professional degree. At the University of Pensylvania's engineering programme that gave us the first modern computer, the first year has an intense writing programme and the liberal arts requirement ensures that a student reads about 70 pages a day. In contrast, the closest an engineering graduate here would get to the humanities is a course or two in management and economics. It is not wonder then that our graduates are uneducated in comparison.

The reforms:

This is a case where the much reviled politicians have got it right by being clever enough to recognize their limitations and consult experts, while we academics, thinking ourselves experts, have got it wrong. The University Reforms were enunciated as policy by the political establishment in a remarkably bipartisan process that spanned the two previous administrations without changes in personnel and continues into the present. The reforms demand a flexible course unit system for a broad-based education.

In implementation, academics have shown that they have not understood the policies. Old year-long courses have simply become 2 semester-long courses. Teaching communications skills as demanded by the reforms, is understood as teaching Microsoft Word and Power Point, things that a good secretary and our children learn on their own and for which students receive no academic credit in a decent university. In the science and engineering courses, little room has been given for students to take courses from other faculties while flexibility is misunderstood as giving more technical electives and these mainly in the final year. A senior don has argued at the Senate that to make electric machinery an elective as at most western universities is to insult the sacred memory of the founders of the faculty (50 years ago) by questioning their judgement! This deep conservatism does not help us change.

Certainly the practice of multi-campus universities (with each campus representing a faculty) does not encourage cross-faculty course offerings for a broad-based education. Nor do single-or-two faculty colleges self-styled as universities. And the new regional universities that are mono-ethnic do not help in building up communication skills and a liberal ethos.

The argument against a liberal arts component in science and engineering programmes that we typically hear is that it would make our hitherto strong programmes soft. It is a wrong argument for two reasons. First, our programmes already have a lot of fluff - first year mathematics that repeats the A. Levels, the so-called communications courses referred to a lot of outdated syllabi and outdated staff who do not update themselves through research, etc. And second, it is good to remember that humanities courses are not necessarily fluff; they only call on and train different skills; perhaps even different parts of the brain. For example, F=ma of physics expresses a relationship between force, mass and acceleration and is able to do so because the relationship is simple. But the price of stocks, subject to many factors including the psychology of the players, cannot be so readily expressed only because it is so complex. Not having an equation therefore does not mean that it is fluff - it only means that we do not understand it fully.

Moreover language courses also draw on logic in teaching grammar, sometimes even using symbolic logic. That grammar is a different form of logic is obvious from the fact that many of our best mathematician-scientists cannot understand why "one of my friend" is illogical. If you are thinking it is because it is a foreign language, it is not - we regularly see similar logical mistakes in Tamil newscasts and leaders.

These considerations make the point that our education is lopsided in not developing the array of skills we need to deal with life. It is also good to remember that the best administrators we have had, the CCS officers, were more often from the classics and were far better and made fewer mistakes than our academics as Vice Chancellors.

Implementing reforms

The reforms need to be implemented and correctly. About 4 years ago, there were several meetings on our campuses on orders up to discuss them. That initial activity (not enthusiasm) has died down. The reforms monitoring spoken of then is no longer seen. Over-confident academics re-invent the well known devolved course unit system with glaring inconsistencies like Repeat Exams, Structured Exams, specified limits for the various assessments, no instructor initiatives without Faculty Board permission, etc.

In a related development, our government has also signed the Dakar Framework and the UNDP's Copenhagen Declaration, the latter with its 10 commitments. These have the solutions to our educational problems if they are implemented. But most of us in the universities have not even heard of them, not even at the highest levels.

However, recognizing that the commitments of the Government are binding on State institutions, and Peradeniya being a premier state university, we, the authors, decided to implement Commitment 6j made by our Government under the Copenhagen Declaration "to develop broad-based education programmes that promote and strengthen respect for all human rights and fundamental freedoms.... and (to) promote the values of tolerance, responsibility and respect for the diversity and rights of others, and provide training in peaceful conflict resolution...."

Accordingly, in teaching the Senate-approved topic, "The Software Engineer and Society," we have introduced human rights. We have used a moot-court to get students to argue and develop their verbal and public speaking skills. To promote greater understanding of opposite points of view, we got Tamils to argue for the State and Sinhalese for the plaintiff in simulated human rights cases. At the time the course began, many in the class of 11 Sinhalese and 9 Tamils who had studied together for 3 years till then, did not known each other by name. At the end they were good friends. We had much fun together. Besides the technical objects, the broader goals of educating a person were realized. Our experience and ideas have appeared in the prestigious indexed journal. The International Journal for Engineering Education, in its issue this month and been presented at the Annual Conference of the American Society of Engineering Education, 2002.

But such isolated efforts are insufficient. They even breed hostility. Demand for such efforts must come from the top if they are to have the support of the community. The government must convince the university community of the basis of its commitments. It needs to inform the universities of the commitments it has made in education, not just lock up the declarations after the fanfare of international conventions. We need more human rights education which has liberal education as a concomitant. We need immediately to implement the reforms. Or we are doomed to add to the swelling ranks of the well-lettered uneducated. 

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