All for the privilege of learning

FREE EDUCATION: Looks like it won’t be very long before politicians and others too will be unable to boast of the great achievements of free education in Sri Lanka.

Through all the whirligig of circulars, amendments, guidelines, special interests and aptitude tests for five-or-six-year olds, we seem to be racing ahead to remove even the facade of that Pearl of Great Price known as free education, and showing it up to be nothing more than a cultured or imitation pearl and not the real thing.

It is good that those who thought of free education as the great source of upward mobility in our society, the great leveler by helping those who are trapped down to rise to heights not reachable by birth, are no more with us, to see the deliberate undoing of their greatest of project by a society that is only concerned with preserving privilege of one type or another.

Both NM Perera, whose seminal thinking on educational reform to serve the needs of the masses led to the initial argument in favour of free education, and CWW Kannangara, who grabbed the idea for all it was worth and saw it become a reality in his day, would rue the days that are upon us; when so much of what is the very antithesis of free education is being worshipped in the corridors of power, the chambers of counsel and the shrines of education.

Indeed we will have non-fee levying schools for some time more and non-fee levying universities too, merely to carry on the fiction that there is free education in our country.

Many a shibboleth will be uttered about free education and its benefits in producing the most literate society in South Asia.

Politicians and others, whose commitment is to fool the people for fear of the truth being known, will keep on with their outpourings of the great achievements of this unique aspect of social welfare in our country.

Yet, all this will hardly help to hide the fact that free education is fast being considered a goner, without even a mask of respectability.

Opportunity

There was something flawed in free education from its outset when it provided the best of education all for free in the absence of a means test.

But that was in the heyday of welfare state as we knew it. It was the generosity of society that knew neither its bounds, nor its actual cost. It was not wholly bad, although to many the value of free education was less.

But with Kannangara’s zeal he established those Maha Vidyalayas, one in every province and even more, to bring education within reach of those who were yearning for it, and the country was in to a very good thing.

Nearly two generations of school-goers reaped the benefits of this great gift bestowed by society, until the beneficiaries began to close in to stop the flow of benefits.

The real value of free education was not in the fact that it was provided at no cost. The value lay in the opportunity it gave those who would have been outside the pale of education, to get the benefits of the three Rs and much, much more.

The parents in a remote village engaged in a constant toil to provide the bare necessities of life to their children, saw in education the opportunity for certain escape for their children from the unbroken cycle of toil that was life.

It was the opportunity to take their children afar into realms of achievement yet unknown, the opportunity to enjoy the pride of having one’s offspring in university.

It was the new dignity of having a doctor, engineer or scholar in the classics set out from one’s humble home.

Free education of one’s children is what gave a new spring to the walk of the rural peasant and urban labourer, the itinerant vendor, and the fisherman casting his net, the constable, midwife, and seamstress and much later to the tea plucker on the plantation.

Free education is in essence shared opportunity. The statistics of examination results are now raising important questions about the success of the system. Free education has a hollow ring to it when schools keep closing down because they cannot compete with the “popular ones”.

Free education or what it promised seems stranded when one sees all those posters along highways and lanes flaunting the promises of this “Sir” or the other, dazzling hopeful students with a leap over the examination barrier, in Double Math or Physics, in Computer Science and everything else in the syllabi for key exams.

Free education must push sensitive parents into shame, when the pressure of competition forces them to send their children for private tuition from Grade 3, in preparation for the Grade 5 scholarship exam, for that is where the separation of the sheep from the goats in education begins.

Ogre of privilege

What we see today is a maddening rush away from shared opportunity to the frightening confines of privilege, battering away at the very foundations of the core value of free education.

Although the State will continue to provide it at no cost for some years more, is not the angelic spread of opportunity that we will see.

Instead, what is raising its head, even higher than it is raised today, is the ogre of privilege, whether it is the privilege or race or religion, or the privilege of old boys and old girls, the niche of government service matched by private sector employment, and on it goes from membership in the Pradesheeya Sabha, Urban or Municipal Council, to the Provincial Council and to Parliament itself, and even higher.

There is an uncanny sense of deja vu in what is happening today. It goes back to the fight against privilege in education that one saw come to fruition of sorts in 1962, when those protected behind walls of privilege that Christian education had erected, were compelled to retreat making room for greater opportunity for those outside.

The changes that took place from 1962 to-date may not be the best, and no doubt some of that egalitarian zeal of the reformers of that day has been twisted to even more manifestations of privilege - best seen in the privilege of the popular school today.

The concept of the popular school today is the stark opposite of what free education means. It speaks not for education, but for the enthronement of privilege.

Its epitome is the International School, unrestricted, untrammeled, making an ugly boast of privilege in education. It is now the envy of many a “popular school” too.

Mark you, the day will not be very far when we will have the old boys and old girls of these centres too, making their own case to keep their privileges within the bounds of old connections.

Many years ago, in the days of the old Soviet Union, when there were some efforts at using “decadent” advertising to market some Soviet products, the magazine “Sputnik” carried at interesting ad for a well known brand of Russian vodka.

The illustration was of this vodka being poured into a classy glass, and the line which was a deft play on the Class Struggle, said: “Reserved for the Privileged Glasses”.

Will it take much longer for us to see signboards outside “popular schools” that say: “Reserved for the privileged people”? Or, is it already too late to write the epitaph for Free Education?