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The reform of 1997 [Continued from page 6 of March 18]

by Eric J. de Silva

(formerly of the Ceylon Civil Service; former Secretary and Director General, Ministry of Education)

Extracts of the Thirteenth J. E. Jayasuriya Memorial Lecture, 14 February 2003.

The miscarriage of the National Education Policy led to the Education Reforms of 1997. This may sound somewhat strange to those who believe they are the same, and needs some explanation.

It would not be difficult to understand the predicament the Strategy Towards a Policy document placed the President in. It provided her with neither a comprehensive policy framework that could form the basis of a national consensus, nor a strategy for achieving such a consensus.

From the time she assumed office she had been telling the country that her government will bring about necessary reforms in education that will enable the country to meet the challenges of the 21st century, and she could not wait any longer. Her attention therefore shifted to a plan of action for immediate implementation by her government. Thus, in December 1996, she appointed a task force, named the Task Force on General Education, to submit to her proposals for revamping the existing system. A task force always connotes an emergency operation. As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the term had its origins in USA to refer to an armed forced organised for a special operation under a unified command.

Later on, it acquired an extended meaning to refer to a group of persons organised for a special task. It is not without significance that the President appointed Minister Richard Pathirana, the political head of the ministry, as chairman of the task force. Among its members were two other politicians, namely the Deputy Minister of Education and Higher Education and another Deputy Minster.

The task force was given three months to submit its proposals. And it did so with military precision. In the course of an interview, which the President gave Rupavahini later in September 1997, the Task Force was commended for submitting its proposals within the time period set by her.

From the standpoint of policy making, it is worth considering how the Task Force on General Education achieved this miracle. It appointed 12 technical committees to report on 12 different areas. There was no Technical Committee looking at the broader policy issues.

Neither did the Task Force have the inclination or time to address them. Based on the proposals made by the Technical Committees and proposals made in previous NEC reports, the Task Force prepared what was called an Executive Summary of proposed actions, with time frames for implementation. According to its preamble, the Task Force met only twice, once for appointing the Technical Committees and once for considering their reports. What the Task Force had to do was obviously an emergency salvage operation. With the President approving the actions proposed in the Executive Summary and declaring 1997 as the Year of Education, the government began implementing the Task Force proposals, without any public discussion or debate in Parliament.

The furthest the proposals went was the Parliamentary Consultative Committee on Education. Only a brief note on the reforms was placed before it, as a comprehensive document was not available at the time.

The Executive Summary was a very basic document running into 10 typed pages. A more comprehensive document entitled Reforms in General Education was issued later in the year in the name of the NEC. This document, for some unknown reason, was not made public. A request made by the Opposition for a full debate on the reforms went unheeded.

This is, despite the Minister having given an undertaking in Parliament in February 1997 that the reforms will first be discussed in the Parliamentary Consultative Committee and the Cabinet, and thereafter placed before Parliament. He had even pledged that no reforms will be introduced into the education system through the back door. One can see how far we had travelled since the days of Mr. Kannangara and the Special Committee in regard to transparency and openness in making education policy.

If we were to say White Papers, Sessional Papers, debates in Parliament and public discussions are counter-productive or irrelevant to policy-making in education, that is an entirely different matter.

The Education Reforms of 1997 did not, therefore, constitute National Education Policy as the reforms were (a) not based on a consensus which transcends party politics, and (b) no declaration was made by the President under Section 2 (1) of the NEC Act. You would remember that I drew a distinction, earlier in my speech, between the National Education Policy envisaged in the NEC Act, and the education policy that a government holding office for the time being ('transient political majority' was the term used by the Youth Commission) thinks is good for the nation. The Education Reforms of 1997 clearly comes under the second category.

However, as part of the party political act, an attempt was made to describe these reforms as the National Education Policy not only in propaganda and publicity campaigns, but even in official statements made by responsible persons and organs of government.

Let me stress that, in this presentation, I am not on the question of whether the 1997 Reforms were good or bad. Beauty, it is said, is in the eye of the beholder. So it is with education reforms! What appears to be good to me may appear bad to another person. Even on the Kannangara reforms opinion differ. It is because opinions differ that you need to achieve the widest possible consensus to ensure some degree of continuity in education policy, and some stability in the system. This is what the Youth Commission and the architects of the NEC Act had in mind.

Post 1997 scenario

The miscarriage of the National Education Policy led to a breakdown in the policy-making mechanism set in place by the NEC Act. This Act, as we know, took away the policy-making function that the Ministry had traditionally enjoyed. Other than day-to-day policy matters or micro-policy, policy formulation in the macro sense was entrusted to the NEC, directly reporting to the President. However, the appointment of the Task Force, for reasons already explained, resulted in the relegation of the NEC to a position of virtual irrelevance. The Ministry itself was otherwise busy, and was content to leave matters relating to education reforms, and hence policy-making in education, in the hands of the Task Force. There is no better proof of this than the passing reference to the subject of education reforms made by the then Secretary of the Ministry in his voluminous work, already referred to (Pieris, 2002). But, the Task Force on General Education had no policy function to perform after it submitted its proposals to the President, resulting in an institutional vacuum in regard to policy.

Consequently, policy-making in education was up there for grabs, to use a popular expression, leaving it open for agencies which had no policy-making mandate, ad hoc groups and even individuals to take important policy decisions.

A good example was the sudden decision taken in the latter part of the 1998 to replace the subject of Life Skill in the junior secondary curriculum with a new subject called Life Competencies with a different focus. Life Skills, which had been taught in schools from the late eighties, was one of the subjects included in the junior secondary curriculum under the 1997 reforms. The decision to replace it with a new subject was taken by the National Institute of Education (NIE), an implementation agency which had no mandate to make/change education policy. Changes were made without adequate discussion at policy level, and a fresh document on the 1997 Reforms incorporating these changes made its appearance towards the end of 1998, under the title General Education Reforms 1997. Incidentally, in her message to this document, the President referred to the reforms as her government's New Education Policy "to revamp the existing system". The failure of the NEC to address the fundamental and critical issues in education led the government to take unilateral decision on some of these matters. While some welcomed these as momentous new initiatives, others looked upon them as ad hoc decisions taken without adequate consultation. A case in point was the decision taken all of a sudden to introduce English as a medium of instruction. On September 30, 2000, the Daily News reported that the government had taken a policy decision to introduce English as a medium of instruction as from 2001.

According to the report, the President had said that implementation of this decision would commence in GCE A/L classes first, and that it would cover all classes from Grade 1 by 2003. (This report was not contradicted, and was confirmed by other reports in the media). When, how and on whose advice or recommendation such an important policy decision was taken was not clear. The NEC had made no such recommendation, no had the Task Force. It came like a bolt from the blue, unlike in the 1940s when the decision to give up the English medium was taken in a totally transparent manner, and after consideration by the relevant authorities. Of course, the government was finally compelled to retract and make the exercise a pilot project to be implemented in A/L science classes on a voluntary basis.

As far as I am aware, there has been no policy statement issued by government on the re-introduction of English as a medium of instruction.

One of the most important, but least discussed, proposals made in the 1981 White Paper was to have periodic conventions on education at both district and national level. The intention was to generate and maintain a dialogue on educational issues, as well as enable a continuing, broad-based review of how the system functions. This proposal never got implemented. Neither did the National Education Commission established in 1991 do anything significant to promote a nation-wide debate on problems and issues in education, as a necessary corollary to the task entrusted to it. It was, therefore, interesting to see the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce stepping into the shoes of the National Education Commission last year, and convening a National Education Conference representing all stakeholders to "unlock a national debate on education and education reform", and formulate reform proposals in education. It was refreshing to see politicians of different political complexions, including the JVP, participating in it.

It is to the credit of the present government that it did not abandon the Reforms of 1997. In an article that I wrote to the newspapers after the change of government in December 2001, I said: "We have just witnessed a major political change in this country. A new government, which was not privy to the reforms while in the ranks of the opposition, has been installed in office. What will the new government do? Will it throw the People's Alliance government's education reforms overboard, and replace them with its own? This is where we find ourselves today due to the failure of the institutional arrangements made in 1991 (for formulating a national education policy) to deliver the goods. The new government which has committed itself to seek a broad consensus on national issues should immediately set about the task of reviewing the reforms which are presently at different stages of implementation, obtain the views of the different stakeholders, accept whatever is good in these reforms in the interest of continuity, and recommence the task of building a national consensus on what the country's education policy should be for the next decade or two".

If we are to re-start the journey towards achieving a consensus on the core issues in education, it would be necessary for the NEC to work with a Parliamentary Committee on National Education Policy. The fact that the present government did not go back on the 1997 Reforms shows that the climate is right and there is scope for achieving a 'highest common factor' of agreement on education policy, across the political divide. Judging by past experience, it does not seem satisfactory to have the President as the sole arbiter of what the National Education Policy of the country should be, and broad-basing it through a Parliamentary Committee would help to gain wider acceptance of the final product in the country at large. [Concluded]

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