Technical education in Sri Lanka
 

In the period of colonial rule, the policy was to encourage scholastic education through an elite oriented university which, in keeping with the policy of limiting education to a privileged few, adopted a restrictive admission policy with which it produced a class of men who manned the administrative and professional services.

Prof. Wiswa Warnapala

In the sphere of technical education, though a Technical College was established in 1893 as an institution attached to the Department of Education, no much attention was paid to the expansion of this institution. It began with 25 students for whom a small workshop, laboratory and classrooms were provided in a building close to the railway station at Maradana, Colombo.

Science Education

This institution, which then was known as the Ceylon Technical School, was entrusted with multiple services; in fact, it had to undertake the training of Science teachers as well. It, in a way, became the nucleus of a centre for science education.

The Government Technical School, therefore, operated on the basis of the limited colonial objectives, and it was re-named as the Ceylon Technical College in 1906, and it, since then, functioned as the main institution which produced the trained and skilled personnel requirements of such Technical Departments as the Railway, Irrigation and Public Works.

In the twenties, especially with the establishment of the University College in 1921 as a colonial higher educational institution, certain significant changes took place in the field of higher education, and they had an impact on the teaching of both science and engineering oriented courses.

Higher Education

It was on the basis of this strategy and policy that the Ceylon Technical College began to teach such subjects as engineering, telegraphy, surveying, chemistry and physics.

It, throughout this period in which there was a major debate in the country on the need to expand higher educational opportunities and this debate, though in the hands of the English educated upper middle class, generated a highly intellectual type of discussion, which eventually paved the way for some reorganisation, the major element of which was the preparing of students for external degrees in Engineering of the University of London.

The development of the Ceylon Technical College became lop-sided because it functioned as a Government Department which came under the purview of members of the colonial bureaucracy, and they, as expected, never thought in terms of economic and social development of the country; they were interested only in the maintenance of law and order.

It was with the establishment of the fully independent and autonomous University of Ceylon in 1942 that the need was felt for the creation of a Faculty of Engineering in 1951, and it was with this landmark change that the country began to produce engineers.

The technical education sector, which, in fact, was subordinate to the University sector, evolved into a highly fragmented sector with a network of Technical Colleges specialising in craft and trade courses.

There were separate institutions, specialising in some kind of technical education, and they operated under different development-oriented Ministries; they conducted more than 3,000 technical and vocational training programmes.

The lack of co-ordination and the failure to establish specific objectives led to so much confusion that this sector, to a great extent, remained dysfunctional. Most institutions conducted both Diploma and lower level courses, and it was through this scheme that additional opportunities were created for the secondary-school leavers who could not find places within the conventional university system.

Employment-Oriented

The lowest level in the structure of the tertiary education, for which the entry qualification was the GCE Ordinary Level, and the courses were largely employment-oriented.

Though such structures came to be established in response to tackle the unemployment of the youth, no institutions were established to produce employable skills and the production of skills required for the economic development of the country.

Technical Training Institute Katunayake

During the seventies and eighties that the traditional view of higher education began to change; higher education was seen as designed primarily to develop and transmit academic knowledge.

Most developing countries wanted to break-away from this tradition and began to emphasize the need for a special category of professionals with specific training, and such professionals were called the higher level technicians; he is not simply a skilled worker.

In other words, the country wanted to produce a higher level technicians who has both skilled worker qualifications and the knowledge required of a technician. Such technicians should have both scientific and technical knowledge that could be used for development.

The emphasis was on a specific education that represented an intermediate level between the engineer and the specialised worker, and therefore, a specific system of education had to be devised to meet the demand for training which up to his time was unheard of in higher education.

Technological Knowledge

This type of education, which we propose to impart through the SLIATE, was technology-oriented, and it was closely linked to the development of scientific and technological knowledge in the modern world.

The higher level technicians, whom we produce through the SLIATE, must be capable of mastering how to use a machine or a technological tool; they must have sufficient technological knowledge as well as adequate expertise to be able to make optimum use of the equipment.

In other words, aim was to produce technicians with skills based more solid technological knowledge so that such a trained person would also facilitate adaptation to change.

Yet another factor was the need to respond to the evolving demands of the economy; the needs of the productive sectors of the economy need to be taken into consideration.