Meeting Mr. Eric de Silva's contentions
The need is to raise the quality of education

By G. Uswattearatchi (Marga Institute)
William Whewell, a great Master of Trinity College, Cambridge is reputed to have remarked "Don't change any thing for the first time!". The Ministry of Education is flouting that rule regarding the structure of schools in this country and Mr. Eric de Silva (September 20, 1998) while recognizing the need for reorganizing the schools system in the country raises very disturbing questions regarding the wisdom of the changes proposed by the National Education Commission and a Presidential Task Force and accepted by government for implementation.

Mr. de Silva cannot be taken lightly. Policy formulation in this country, until a few years back, was primarily the hand work of a few senior government officials, except where major ideological factors came into play. These officials were, without exception, men ( no women) of very high intellectual calibre, often the most intelligent students in their age cohort. They gained intimate knowledge of policy formulation and implementation but were required by the demands of their positions in government not to speak out about them in public. Many of them were preferred for positions in the gift of government after superannuation and that further prevented them from offering their quite considerable wisdom and knowledge about policy making for the benefit of the public. Those that expected such preferment necessarily had to remain discrete with their views on matters of public interest when they did not coincide with those of government. That process denied to the public arguably the most valuable source of information and comment on public policy, especially when universities were reluctant to examine in detail facets of government policy. We are fortunate that Mr. de Silva who has had long and close contact with education policy has stepped into waters which he can only help to clear.

Reviews of the nature undertaken by Mr. de Silva are all the more important now that there is a widespread perception that policy formulation has passed over from the senior bureaucracy, in part, to young professionals whose credentials are personal acquaintance with persons in power rather than competence on their part and, in part, to lenders from overseas. In those circumstances, it is of tremendous importance that root and branch changes in a massive system such as the schools system in the country be undertaken after as wide a review process as possible. I have gone to several Seminars on education reforms conducted by outstanding professionals from government and universities, which unfortunately were not occasions for discussing the merits of the proposals but for giving out information on how the new policies were to be implemented. Mr. de Silva has made an excellent departure now, one hopes not too late. I want to add some wind to his sails.

Successive governments have commendably provided opportunities for virtually all children who wish to enrol in schools to do so, irrespective of habitat income level or other extraneous factors. Parents have most enthusiastically grasped those opportunities and sent their children to school, irrespective of sex. Consequently, net enrolment rates in entry level grades have been close to 100 per cent. This is no mean achievement at our levels of income per head. Simply compare that with the situation in India, Bangladesh or oil-rich Nigeria. These successes are a tribute to our society, its politicians and the teachers.

However we are now in a new ball game. As birth rates fell from 41 per thousand in 1948 to 19 per thousand in 1996, the number of children enrolled in Grades I-V fell from 2,081,000 in l991 to 1,980,000 in 1995. Since drop-out rates in grades I-V have little room to rise, the total number of students in primary schools will fall. Consequently, most primary schools (3,000 or so in number) will require to be reorganized; several will be closed . At the same time as the economy grows and as more parents can spare young ones to go to school for longer periods and realize the value of that education, the population in second level schools will rise because rising proportions of students stay in school to older ages. So one expects second level schools to expand and some to be newly built. The fastest expansion will take place at university level because no more than two per cent of an age cohort go to university now and that proportion will rise as more of each successive age cohort complete a second level education. New universities will be built. In addition to these quantitative changes, a whole host of qualitative changes will need take place of which it would be unwise to lose sight.

In those circumstances, this is quite clearly the right time to ignore Whewell and bring about change. The schools need to respond to the new situations. The most important of those situations is the need to raise the quality of education. Mr. de Silva contends that the proposals of government to re-organize the school system do not respond to that need. And I wish to take up another major change proposed by the government: reform of the examination for admission to universities.

Those who design systems of education seem to fall into two groups. In the United States of America, students in many States who complete high school do not sit for an examination conducted by an outside body. At College, she would select any combination of courses which suited her fancy. She would graduate from College having taken courses in Anthropology, Book Binding, Cooking, Drama, Mathematics, and Zulu Culture. She would have taken an amount of courses adequate to accumulate the number of credits to earn a degree. She would also have taken some courses which are required to seek admission to graduate schools in certain professional courses of training e.g. medicine. It is when a student enters Law School, Medical School or Business School or Graduate School in any other discipline (Mathematics, Physics, History, Economics or Psychology) that a student begins to specialize. During 12 years at school and four years at College, 16 years in all, a student reads widely to build up a background on which to stand and conquer some little field of knowledge. In Sri Lanka, we seem to follow the other path. We spend eight years in school learning the rudimentary skills for acquiring knowledge and then spend the next five years progressively reducing our areas of competence and then begin to train ourselves in a profession ( medicine, law, engineering or veterinary science), or after the lapse of one year narrow our reading to one discipline( mathematics, history or zoology). The reduction in the number of subjects examined at the GCE A'Level will increase that specialization further. A good command over one language and mathematical skills is essential for mastering virtually any field of study now. Extremely few are likely to be so precocious as to gain these skills by age 16 years. The overwhelming majority of students would go to university under this new scheme without adequate skills in mathematics and language to pursue higher studies. One of two consequences can follow: either universities will become second level schools teaching mathematics and language skills; or the economy will get a group of university graduates very poorly educated. Neither is desirable!

The seemingly most persuasive argument for reducing the number of subjects offered at A'Level is that the burden on students will become lighter. However, students in other parts of the world seem to carry much higher burdens with great aplomb. Students in France who complete high school and are academically talented sit for the Baccalaureat (Bac) in seven subjects, four at advanced level and three at ordinary level without evident harmful effects. Students in Britain take four subjects at advanced level. In US good students would take up SAT together with four or five Placement Examinations. There is the argument that in Sri Lanka intense competition for places in Universities compels students to drive themselves to extremes to beat the competition by one or two marks. But that would not change a bit, if the number of subjects were reduced to three without increasing the number of places in university and without ceasing to make university education such a valuable free good to the individual. They still need to beat the competition and that still means driving oneself as hard as earlier. Consequently one does not see the merit of the argument here, either.

Along with the reduction in the number of subjects for the A'Level examination to three, it has been proposed to introduce a Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), now designated a Common General Paper (CGP) to select students to university. Some Colleges in US use the scores in SAT, together with the students transcript of performance in high school and recommendations from her teachers at school to select students for admission. These count to no more than six percent of all colleges, 175 out of 3,000 colleges according to Henry Rosovsky of Harvard. However, wherever SAT scores are used, it is not used as a minimum mark, qualifying a student for admission but as a means of picking up more able students. In Sri Lanka which still admits no more than the two first percentiles of intellectual ability in an age cohort to its universities, a well designed aptitude test will have all of them scoring near the ceiling mark if the score in the Common General Paper is used to obtain a qualifying mark, then it does not serve any purpose, because all students who otherwise qualify for admission to universities would invariably score well above that minimum and the CGP becomes irrelevant. If, in contrast, the score in the Common General Paper is to determine competitively who would be admitted to universities, a whole host of difficulties arise in designing a culturally neutral set of questions. These are severe in US and would be almost insuperable in a community culturally so diverse as in Sri Lanka.

In this context, it is useful to recall the principal reason for creating SAT in US some time in 1922 or 1923. There were wide differences in scores in achievement tests between students from the North Eastern sea board, where facilities for second level education were excellent and the mid-West and the South where those facilities were poor. An alternative to achievement tests had to be found to eliminate bias arising from those differences. The same rationale applies when graduates from excellent research universities and those from third rate colleges seek admission to graduate schools and aptitude tests ( L-SAT, M-CAT and GRE) are used to select those with good promise rather than good teaching behind them. It is common knowledge that there are differences in the quality of teaching among schools in Sri Lanka. However, it is unlikely that the CGP is the answer to that problem.

It is probable that the purpose of the CGP was to get students to become aware of the world of knowledge far wider than their own disciplines. The reduction in the number of subjects which a student will read at A'Level reduces the chance that a student seeking admission to the medical faculty may read English or Mathematics. Then the question is whether CGP is the best means of achieving that objective. Question papers of this kind are more likely to make the student collect information which become trivia rather than a help to construct imaginatively a whole universe of knowledge in which to place her own little tree of a discipline. A more productive method was the one tried at some of the Red Brick universities in UK( especially Keel) of providing foundation courses in which some of the best teachers in the university tried to survey the world of knowledge for young undergraduates in their first term at university. Although that route is not without obstacles, it is less of a blind alley than the Common General Paper.

What does transpire now is the need to re-think the entire structure of schools and universities. The University of Ceylon was designed in the 1940s with the old British universities practices of teaching in mind. Each student would work in close association with a teacher in his undergraduate life. We were fortunate to benefit from that system in Peradeniya in the 1950s. That system no longer applies. Most students do not speak to a teacher personally ever. They are taught more like in the large and second rate state universities in US or some Departments of the London School of Economics. That process of close association between students and teachers takes place in US only in graduate school. Those highly educated and sensitive students, some of whom will go on to do good research can now come only from good graduate schools in Sri Lanka, which do not yet exist. There is a bewildering array of post graduate institutes, graduate programmes and others. In a new system, as suggested here, young men and women will follow specialized course of education at graduate level. At undergraduate level they will explore worlds of knowledge by following whatever courses of study catch their fancy. They can be helped with some guidance.

A new structure like that will increase student-life and raise costs of education. A student will spend 13 years in school, four years as undergraduate and two to five years at graduate school; 19-22 years of studentship compared to 17-19 years now. That longer period of education may now be necessary because of the growth of knowledge. There was a time in the 18th century and earlier when students entered Oxford and Cambridge at age 14 and studied the trivium and the quadrivium in a period of three years. But at that stage a man was considered learned in mathematics, if he had learned but Euclid and Newton. Now every high school student would master that. A new structure might be forced on us because present structures do not produce the sort of university graduate required to lead this country in industry and commerce, in politics and research and in the bureaucracy and elsewhere.

If these arguments and those presented by Mr. de Silva are valid, then the present education reforms are both misguided and inadequate. Universities and professional organizations in education had better look for better and comprehensive reforms. And yet not let the best stand in the way of the good!