English as an educational tool

TOUGH ASSIGNMENT: I started work at Isurupaya in June 2001, primarily to restart English medium in 2002, but also with a brief to improve English in general.

It was a tough assignment, made more difficult by increasing responsibilities at the university, where I foolishly succumbed to a request by students to resume the post of Dean.

I was also coordinating the Degree Programme the university had started at the Military Academy, which also required more input, administrative as well as academic, than initially anticipated.

Isurupaya was a difficult place in which to work, even though it had extremely able people at the top then, not only Tara de Mel as Secretary, but Lalith Weeratunge as her principal Additional Secretary, and experienced professionals such as Nihal Herath and G L S Nanayakkara among the others.

English however was a backwater, run by two not especially energetic ladies, though with both Tara and Lalith taking personal interest in the programme, we managed to move fast.

Meetings with Zonal Directors, as well as Provincial English administrators and trainers, indicated general enthusiasm for the idea, though there were queries as to whether it would be possible.

The circular went out immediately then to all Zonal Directors, asking if any schools wished to offer three subjects in English for Grade 6 students from 2002 (Mathematics, Health and Environmental Studies, this last supposedly a foundation for Science as well as Social Studies).

Meanwhile, the World Bank agreed to assist three separate components, the production of materials, the training of teachers, and provincial monitoring.

With Lalith expediting the bureaucratic requirements, while I ran up and down the stairs getting the required multiple signatures for everything, we could set up systems of delivery almost immediately.

Take up in the Zones depended on the enthusiasm or otherwise of the Zonal Director. In collating figures towards the end of the year, we found 93 schools, about the number of Educational Zones in the country, but it was nothing like one per zone.

Many ignored the initiative altogether, including Colombo, where only Ananda College and its neighbour Asoka Vidyalaya registered early. In contrast the Sri Jayewardenepura Zone had plenty of schools, due largely to a hyper-efficient Zonal Director.

Years later, when problems arose as to the Ananda College Principal, without commenting on those issues, I pointed out that he alone among prestigious schools had responded actively to an initiative he felt would benefit his students.

When I met him in January 2002, when delivering the first tranche of books, we communicated only in Sinhala - but he, like the Principal of Nugawela Central, another enthusiast, was determined to provide students with what they had missed themselves.

In the midst of the tribulations we went through on the Project, the commitment of such educationists continued to give me heart.

Preparation of materials

Tara had seemed a hard taskmaster, in giving me so many additional responsibilities when I had joined the Ministry only to reintroduce English medium.

However, I soon realised how appalling the problems were, and how essential it was to introduce a more modern outlook into a Ministry stuck in a mindset rapidly dooming our children to obsolescence.

Of the three components into which the World Bank package of aid had been divided, the most complex seemed to be the production of materials.

Though in the other cases as well, the training of teachers and provincial monitoring, external inputs were essential since the Ministry and Provincial Ministries had few professionals competent in English, with regard to materials there was simply nothing on which to build.

What should have been our salvation was the multiple book option which the Ministry had recently tried to introduce, to ensure better textbooks for students than those provided in recent years.

Unfortunately the original interest in the programme evinced by international publishers, such as Oxford University Press, had been dampened by what seemed a combination of subversion and intransigence.

In the end, with Tara out of the way, the project was reduced to the award of printing contracts, for which Ministry and NIE personnel set up cartels that bid together with printing firms, and won contracts regardless of the quality of what they offered or the capacity of the personnel involved.

All this became clear much later. In 2001 what was apparent was that, for English medium books to be produced in time for 2002, the whole operation had to be conducted externally.

Fortunately the English Association of Sri Lanka had developed considerable expertise in this field, working first with the British Council and then, with Canadian assistance, for the Affiliated University Colleges English programmes.

Later the contract they undertook drew harsh criticism from Ministry personnel but, since Lalith Weeratunga was in charge of the administration of the project, it could be clearly shown that all due procedures were followed.

The idea that EASL, which ended up subsidizing the exercise, proved laughable when it was found that the unit cost of their books that covered three subjects was just Rs 150, whereas the cost of the books the government produced, for six or seven subjects altogether, was around Rs 700.

The EASL print run was just 4000 initially, raised to 7000 as more schools joined the programme, whereas the government printed hundreds of thousands of books, where the unit cost was even less.

But if a comparison of the costs suggested that someone somewhere was making a lot of money (a perennial problem, with at least one Ministry Secretary having had to resign in the nineties for such a reason), an even greater crime against the country was the quality of the books given to students.

Fortunately the rationale for English medium had included the need to open the minds of students to different ideas and give them access to a range of materials.

It was recognised that such materials were not available to those straitjacketed in the vernaculars, when some of those who prepared materials had themselves lost access to wider dimensions of learning because they could not readily read in English.

So EASL was required by its contract to introduce additional material, such as the concept of chronology, though this was boxed separately so that teachers could omit it if they wished.

I felt enormously justified by all this when, at a workshop in Hambantota, a bright young teacher from Theraputta Central in Ambalantota told me that, when the Iraq War broke out in 2003, one of his students had noted that that was an old River Valley Civilization.

But, alas, such initiatives were considered improper by the Ministry of Education. After using the EASL books for two years, it was claimed that it was unfair for English medium students to have more in their textbooks than other students had.

Direct translations were commissioned, and for one year - before new syllabuses for the different sections of Social Science were introduced - these students had to go back to the tedious trivialities of the old textbook, reproduced word for word.