As we see it

Education is a subject that man is preoccupied with from birth to death. It could be ignored only at one's peril.

I do not mean formal education. What I mean is the process of learning how to live in society.

As in any other subject, man learns by trial and error. So does mankind. The process of education goes from the known to the unknown. What is unknown today will be known tomorrow.

Thus education is a never ending process. It goes on and on ad infinitum. Daily, hourly we add to our knowledge. Knowledge grows by degrees, quantitatively. At times it takes a quantum leap to a new state. A whole new world may open up.

For example when man broke free from the gravitational orbit of the Earth, an entire world lay open before him.

There are few interesting corollaries from the above, one is that no knowledge is perfect. All knowledge is in a process of renewal and renovation, what is true today may become not so true tomorrow when a truer knowledge is discovered.

This is nothing strange, just recollect how man earlier thought the world is flat.

Then later it was discovered to be round. Now we know that it is not exactly round as it is a bit flattened at the poles.

However important education is to the people and society it is a subject less talked about in the media. During the time of the war it was natural for other subjects to fade out of prominence.

Now it is different. Hence it is a subject that should receive better attention of the media and society. All stakeholders should freely voice their opinion on issues that affect education.

And in the case of education the stakeholders comprise the Government, students, teachers and parents. That means virtually everybody.

A country's future depends on education of its people. Education is the means by which human resources are developed.

Consequently any country that does not spend sufficient resources on human resource development will lag behind. All countries that have reached the status of a developed country have allocated and used large outlays for education for a considerable period of time.

In the context of the knowledge society to which mankind is stepping in this 21 Century, the relevance and significance of education has increased several-fold.

Problems in the Sri Lankan education sphere are many. We hope to discuss some of them in this page in the following weeks. Since this would be an inter-active page readers are free to comment on the views that would be carried in it.

They are also free to send in their opinion on matters concerning education, even if they have not been raised in this page.

They will be also accommodated in this page as space permits.

- The Guru