Promoting curriculum reform as well as English

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I mentioned last week, amongst the efforts I had to make to ensure that the lethargy of the Ministry of Education did not destroy the English medium programme, the delivery of books to schools all round the country. Before I was able, with support from a parent, to use a courier service, I sent my driver with one of the Sabaragamuwa students who helped me through the World Bank support funds, to deliver parcels of books round the country, which was possible in the first few months of the programme before it took off with the encouragement of Minister Karunasena Kodituwakku.

It was only Samantha Wijesirigunawardena whom I could ask to do this for we had had only two boys doing English in this second year, which was the one I used, and the other was Tamil so I did not think I should allow him to incur any risks in travelling with just Kithsiri round the country. Or indeed any embarrassment, for they had to stay overnight sometimes in cheap hotels, and he might have been subject to unnecessary questioning.

Samantha and Kithsiri had a great time, though the former was upset when he was mistaken for a travelling salesman and decided to remove his tie when entering a school. They were treated very well by the schools they visited, and it was clear principals and teachers and students were delighted with the programme.

But all that had to come to an end, though my association with Samantha continued for when we took on new staff at Sabaragamuwa for the English Department he too was selected, along with Mahesh Hapugoda and Rohan Abeywickrema who had got their degrees after AUC Diplomas. All three did well, and the last two got their doctorates in time. But Samantha left academia when the University Grants Commission insisted I be got rid of from the positon of Dean on the grounds that there should be a full-time Dean. I was not willing to commit myself to this and gave up the position in 2005 and then went on sabbatical in the middle of that year. Soon after that Samantha resigned and joined a private company. He was married by then, to a fellow student though she had not read English, and I was honoured to have signed at his wedding – as I had done for several of those I have talked about here.

Before I took my sabbatical, in the middle of 2004, Tara was back in the saddle after the election where Chandrika triumphed, and I was back on contract at the Ministry. This time I had a wider brief for I was appointed to the Academic Affairs Board of the National Institute of Education and then asked to chair it. We then, though sadly not straight away, started on curriculum reform in a big way, including the development of achievement levels in English.

This is something that was never done properly, though it is essential to lay down in the curriculum what students should know at the end of the year. In those days the Ministry did not even include the curriculum in the textbooks, and when I protested they claimed that it was implicit. That absurdity was remedied after I drew attention to the impracticality of expecting teachers to have to extrapolate what was required learning, but even now there has been no attempt to draw up a coherent programme for the whole grade span. That should be issued separately, to make clear for instance by when students should have mastered the construction of simple sentences and when to move onto longer ones, which tenses they should master (not all eighteen which some teachers inflict on students with the result that they know nothing), how pronouns are to be used with careful attention to their antecedents. Unfortunately the coherent document we prepared, and put on the NIE website when disaster struck, meant nothing to the rather desiccated old educationist who replaced me on the Academic Affairs Board of the NIE.

Working on the curriculum was an urgent necessity, for one had to try too to introduce some sanity into the learning requirements (and not allowing endless concentration on Anuradhapura, which was a favourite of the lumpen nationalists at the NIE, to the exclusion of the great achievements say of Ruhuna and incipient manufacturing in Sabaragamuwa, let alone the French and Industrial Revolutions which had been left out in one particular revision). I tried too to broadbase aesthetic education, and to introduce basic understanding of other religions in the religion curriculum.

I enjoyed trying to make a difference in these areas, since I did not have enough to do at the Ministry, for there the heady enthusiasm with which English medium had been introduced three years earlier could not be recaptured. Indeed in the middle of 2005, having started on my sabbatical, I tried to resign, but Tara begged me to stay on the grounds that I was about the only person at the Ministry she could talk to. By then she knew the writing was on the wall, for Chandrika lost a year of her Presidency through carelessness, the Supreme Court ruling against her in an interpretation of the constitution that was a travesty though unfortunately her legal team failed to make the required arguments about this.

That carelessness signalled the end of productive reforms in Education, for after Chandrika’s Presidency was truncated there has been nothing imaginative in the field. The new Minister who was appointed by Mahinda Rajapaksa when he won the Presidency in November 2005 hated Tara and all her doings. And though both Mahinda and the Minister told me they wanted English medium to continue, there was little support at the Ministry and I realized I could not take things further and soon resigned. Though I had stayed on for the first part of my sabbatical, early in 2006 I was to go abroad and thought it time to call quits. But I knew that English medium would now continue, and so it has done, though at nothing like the level we had envisaged in those early heady days of change.

Prof Rajiva Wijesinha