Education: where do we go from here? - Part IV:

Dignity of labour must be inculcated into young minds

Excerpts from the sixth annual Sujata Jayawardena memorial oration by Secretary to the President Lalith Weeratunga delivered on November 26 at the BMICH

Continued from yesterday

All these remarkable changes that we envisage in the schools system must go hand in hand with quality teacher education and world class education administrators. A futuristic outlook in our system of education will undoubtedly require sea changes in the whole system.

Schools and classrooms naturally will assume huge importance and as Mahinda Chintana envisages there will have to be at least one quality school per Divisional Secretariat Division. This is being implemented in the form of Isuru Schools and these as I have explained earlier, must necessarily be Secondary schools, i.e. from Grade six to 13. Schools must become the most impactful and influential institutions of the community. It must radiate excellence thereby transforming localities, and local communities.

Very often our focus is on the schools as a whole. Rarely do we focus on the classroom. All policies, programs, projects and any activities will finally boil down to the student-teacher interaction. How qualitative this vital interaction should be and how much influential it can be in a pupil's life is not understood by many. A student's life is mainly fashioned and moulded within the four walls of the classroom and yet we do not seem to be bothered about the quality of the teacher. There were times when politically motivated appointments were made to the teacher cadre. Fortunately, the Government has laid down a golden rule that no teacher will come into the system without being a graduate or a diplomate of a National College of Education. But are we confident that we are sending a fine human being into the classroom in the form of a teacher? Any negative behaviour on the part of the teacher can ruin a student's life forever. The four million odd students in our State school system are at the mercy of the 215,000 teachers in our system. Are they emotionally intelligent persons handling the lives of our future citizens? What about the quality of the principals? If I may strike a personal note, my parents were teachers and I, as a child, have observed how passionate they were in their profession; each day, I have seen them meticulously preparing to go to class. Therefore, I can speak with a sense of authority and first hand experience on this subject of teachers.

Another aspect is the non university tertiary education system, also known as the vocational and technical education and training sector. There is a school of thought that vocational training should be introduced at the secondary school. There is a rationale in that. Dignity of labour must be inculcated into the young minds while still in school. One then begins to appreciate that there are many vocations, professions and that each of them is essential for the well-being of the societal fabric. In the school curriculum of few decades back, students had to learn at least one discipline from among many, such as wood work, metal work and pottery.

Later on, a subject called Life Skills came into being. Nowadays, these seem to have disappeared.

There are about 350,000 children seeking admission to Grade 1 every year. Of these, only around 20,000 finally make it to the University, which means that the balance will have to pursue non university tertiary education or go in search of employment. This is around 94 percent of a particular age cohort. If we are to cater to the needs of the labour market and provide the skills to those pursuing certain vocations, then our technical and vocational education and training system needs to be qualitatively upgraded. Mode of delivery must also be re-thought of. We have the well accepted apprenticeship schemes that can be put to good use. If suffices to say that this sector is most crucial to the well-being of the nation.

Over the years many attempts have been made to put in place a demand driven vocational and technical education and training system but my personal opinion is that there seem to be much fine tuning to be done. Those who enter the vocational and technical training system must be provided with apprenticeship as they do in Germany. Germans having had a sound Guild system for centuries have mastered the art of dual training which means that trainees after an initial training in an institution will go to the industry to learn on-the-job.

After sometime, they come back to the institution and finally go again to the industry for completing the on-the-job training. We have now introduced the NVQ (National Vocational Qualification) system that follows a common testing scheme that allows the employer to estimate the quality of a future employee.

I want to briefly mention about the university sector that has drawn much attention of most of us. There is little doubt that we must bring about radical reforms to this sector. The fact that majority of our graduates are not employable is an indictment on the entire system of education. The most qualified and intelligent children in the country enter the university system each year. Certain educationists may have reservations about the GCE Advanced Level Examination as to whether it is the best way to select children into the Universities. I am not going into that debate.

My concern is having taken these bright children into the universities, how we make them unemployable after three or four years of university education. Barring the professional courses such as Medicine, Engineering and a few others, most of the courses do not produce the right individual, in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes required to be employable as well as successful in life. Most private sector employers do not like to employ our graduates.

This has to be given serious thought and remedial action taken without any further delay. There are also a few positive cases that need to be highlighted. The newly established Uva Wellassa University obviously has understood the core issues of university education and its innovative and creative Vice Chancellor Chandra Embuldeniya, also happens to be its founder, has created the right mix in the courses they offer leading to almost all of his students having high demand. This is a fine example that can be emulated.

We must look to the future and understand the demands it will place on our country and its people. We must also not just dismantle institutions and make new ones. What must be done is to re-invigorate the institutions and encourage them to re-think their strategy in terms of the emerging needs of our nation.

Let us hope we succeed in equipping our minds with the requisite knowledge to lead us to a more abundant world. The next generation could carry forward the chain of progress with lighter steps.

R.D. Laing, a Scottish Psychiatrist said "The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds." Concluded