Reforming education: Finishing the unfinished task:

Central Schools system - a gift to poor children

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Dr. C. W. W. Kannangara memorial lecture delivered by Emeritus Professor Carlo Fonseka on October 13 in Colombo.

Part I of this article was published yesterday.

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By 1944, Dr. Kannangara had formulated his diagnosis of what was wrong with the educational body politic of the country.

1. It is English education that is dividing the people of the country into two classes.

2. Poor children cannot get a good education because their parents cannot pay for it.

3. The denominational system of schools is intrinsically divisive.

Given this diagnosis, the logical remedy suggested itself.

1. Replace English with Swabasha as the medium of education.

2. Make education free from kindergarten to university.

3. Replace the denominational system of schools with a national system of schools.

In May 1944, Dr. Kannangara presented to the State Council the recommendations of a Special Committee on education which had been appointed in 1940 and had published its report in late 1943. In concluding his speech which he later reminisced was the greatest speech of his long career, he declared: "... Sir, you will realize that it will not be an easy task to bring these reforms or a substantial portion of them into operation all at once.

It must necessarily take time. These will have to be introduced in sections during different periods and may take 15, 20 or 30 years... Sir, it was the boast of the great Augustus that he found Rome of brick and left it of marble.

How much nobler will be the state of the State Council boast when we shall be able to say that we found education dear and left it cheap; that we found it a sealed book and left it an open letter; that we found it the patrimony of the rich and left it the inheritance of the poor..." Greatly moved by this speech, M. S. Aney, the Indian Government representative had warmly embraced Dr. C. W. W. Kannangara and said: "You would have been worshipped as a god had you been born in India."

The free education scheme began in 1945.

Education in the Swabasha medium commenced in 1946.

State control of the education system was firmly established by 1961.

Self assessment

In January 1947, in an address to the Inter-Asian Relations Conference, Dr. Kannangara made a self-assessment of the significance of his reforms: "... In spite of abuse and calumny, vilification and ridicule, I have succeeded in obtaining the sanction of the State Council for a scheme of free education providing for children of the land equal opportunities to climb to the highest rung of the university irrespective of the status or financial capacity of their parents and for obtaining for our national languages, their rightful place in that scheme, as an essential pre-requisite for building up a free, united and independent nation.

This is a stupendous step forward in the regeneration of our race and I am proud to have had the privilege and good fortune of inaugurating these measures." This is an assessment that is widely endorsed. Many years later, Prof. J.E. Jayasuriya voiced the common feeling memorably when he wrote: "To very few people have so many owed so much, as the men and women and boys and girls of this country owned to Kannangara".

The immediate consequence of the introduction of free education, though was to grant a bonanza to the well-to-do, by giving them without payment, the good education they had hitherto been paid for by them. The masses continued to receive free, the poor quality education that had all along been free for them, except for the relatively small number of gifted students in the Central Schools which had been inaugurated by Dr. Kannangara in the early 1940s.

Central schools

In my judgement, the single most significant educational reform Dr. Kannangara inaugurated to benefit the children of the underprivileged classes was the establishment of the Central School system. This commenced in 1941. By 1947, there were 54 Central Schools, one in each electorate into which the country had been divided at that time. These schools were a highly effective strategy that Dr. Kannangara devised to provide an education of superior quality at least to a small number of gifted rural children.

In 1943, he went a step further and awarded full scholarships to the 20 best performers, boys or girls, in each Central School.

In my judgement, the single most significant educational reform Dr. Kannangara inaugurated to benefit the children of the underprivileged classes was the establishment of the Central School system. This commenced in 1941. By 1947, there were 54 Central Schools, one in each electorate into which the country had been divided at that time

The aim of the Central School was "to collect together the pupils who have passed the primary stage from all schools within a certain radius and provide education for them in a Central School staffed with the best teachers obtainable". The scholarships entitled the scholars to free board and lodging in school hostels. Education in these Central Schools which were all secondary schools, was in the English medium. By 1946, there were a total of 11,879 pupils in these Central Schools.

The schools presented candidates for the Senior School Certificate (English). In 1946, of the 121 candidates who sat from 14 Central Schools, 61 passed, nine with distinctions in English. In August 1945, Dr. Kannangara said in the State Council: "I have been condemned for offering this 'false pearl' of Central Schools.

I say that it is a pearl of great price. Sell all that you have and buy it for the benefit of the whole country". From a strictly educational point of view, I should agree with Dr. Kannangara that even more than free education, it was the Central Schools system that was the pearl of great price he gifted to the really poor children of the nation. Unfortunately, this system of Central Schools did not develop and prosper in the way he envisaged.

Unfinished task

As I see it, the unfinished task is to infuse a measure of excellence to the free education that became the inheritance of the poor and the rich of the country. The major premise of the main reforms that will be proposed is my conviction that in the 21st Century, to educate Sri Lankan children exclusively in and through Sinhala or Tamil, is effectively to deny them the opportunity of rising as far as their natural talents could take them. In other words, I believe that students aspiring to higher education necessarily have to be at least bilingual. The greatest novelist and perhaps the most learned man in our country's recent history was Martin Wickramasinghe (1891-1976). In the 1950's, when linguistic nationalism in our country was at its peak, this greatly respected sage wrote an essay called The Language Problem in Ceylon. In this essay he said: "Some educationists emphasize the evils of segregating Sinhalese and Tamil children for teaching them their own languages. But they ignore the growth of a worse form of communalism that places a barrier between the English-education minority and the vast majority of people of the same community.

In Ceylon, the causes of class-consciousness are not entirely economic. Evils of segregation resulting from differences of language, dress and caste aggravate it. I believe that those who advocate English as the only language as well as the nationalists are ignoring a vital fact: we are now a bilingual people".

Bilingualism in the sciences

So far as scientific medicine is concerned, I have not the slightest doubt that although it is possible to teach a sort of scientific medicine in Sinhala, it would not be fair by the intelligent, highly-motivated, eager students to do so. Fortunately, when the time came in 1970 statutorily to teach medicine in the universities in Swabasha, Muslim students were still entitled to be taught in the English medium. In the Colombo Medical Faculty, Sinhala and Tamil medium students too were strongly urged to attend those lectures in the English medium. Gradually it became possible to make English the medium of instruction in the medical faculties. Engineering faculties and science faculties to a lesser extent, have also become more or less bilingual. As a result there is evidence that the upper 10 percent of our students in our medical faculties are probably as well instructed as medical students in any part of the world.

Other university disciplines

Concerning other disciplines such as history, economics and Sinhala and Tamil, what should our policy be? Taking the extreme case of Sinhala, let me summarize the views of Prof. Ediriweera Sarathchandra on the subject. They are contained in a book titles Guru Guna Samara published by his pupil Dr. Sucharitha Gamlath. According to Dr. Gamlath because there are three ethnic groups in the country, speaking three different languages, Sarathchandra had believed that Sinhala, Tamil and English should be the languages of administration.

He had been very disappointed about Sinhala being made the medium of education. He had often asked how we could access world knowledge without English. In a letter he had written to the newspapers, he had gone so far as to say that, "one who knows only Sinhala doesn't know even Sinhala". Dr. Gamlath himself has declared unequivocally that monolingualism has ruined higher education in the humanities in our country. He quotes with approval, a remark that Dr. N.M. Perera had made in Parliament: "Teaching in Sinhala is alright, but government must ensure that students acquire a sound knowledge of English".

To be continued