By Dr. Nicholas Ruwan Dias and Niresh Eliatamby
Last Sunday, hundreds of thousands of little children were put at risk by forcing them to sit for the Grade Five Scholarship Exam, during the middle of the worst outbreak in Sri Lanka of the deadliest pandemic to challenge mankind in more than a century.
A few days before that, a male teacher was arrested for sexually abusing four six-year-old girls, when their parents sent them for individual tuition classes for the same Scholarship Exam that they would sit in four years’ time.
Meanwhile, employers throughout Sri Lanka have been lamenting for decades that graduates and Advanced Level (A/L) and Ordinary Level (O/L)-qualified young persons possess few skills for employment.
Private and state sector vocational training institutes are filled with hundreds of thousands of youngsters who learnt little in school, despite having good A/L and O/L results. Thus, large numbers of Sri Lankan youth spend their most productive years outside the job market.
The present Sri Lankan educational system, which is focused on A/L and O/L, does not allow children to think and unleash their potential to build up their own future in an innovative, systemic way.
We have an illusion that our kids are advanced in emerging technologies, but their knowledge is more often just imaged on past papers and they know little of technology.
The extraordinary operation of sending children for an exam during Covid underlined the unhealthy attitude towards education in this country, where success in non-innovative exams are deemed to be the yardstick of academic success, despite much of the world moving away from such an antiquated system. Although there was significant grumbling about the holding of the “Shishyathwa” and other exams, many parents nonetheless felt that they had little choice but to put lives at risk and have children take their exams.
Parrot education
Sri Lanka’s current method of education fails children by teaching them as one teaches parrots, not realising that the education system does not inspire or motivate children to think, reason, and activate their capacity for shaping their future.
Sri Lankan teens are taught to learn the parrot way for their O/L and A/L exams, which was once considered a "gold standard" for intelligence testing. School teachers and tuition gurus are using marking schemes published on examination boards' past papers to prepare children in order to be able to replicate answers without understanding subjects in detail.
Background
The education sector in Sri Lanka has grown rapidly over the past decade, but the standard of learning remains unimaginative and misguided. Quality education is more critical than ever in an increasingly knowledge-based world economy. Education must be aimed at encouraging and building children. The call for increased investment in education has been growing since independence, but the issue of its education policy continues to be addressed by an independent Sri Lanka even over six decades after. Distorted national goals in this critical sector indicate low levels of learning.
Sri Lanka does not promote innovative thinking by emphasising rote learning and its strict evaluation system. There are flaws in the rote teaching approach. Research has found that the mathematics, science, and reading abilities of primary and secondary school students have regressed. It has not only long-term consequences, but is an institutionalised procedure as a detrimental rote method. The students, who read, mingle with people, and experience society, culture, and places in which they move, become well rounded. These all form their views and experiences on their educational journey. The less they experience, the less they explore and the more closed their minds remain.
Tuition masters’ “tuition kada”
Mass classes of over 1,000 students are quite normal in cities and large towns across the country. Nugegoda, Gampaha, Kurunegala, Anuradhapura, and many other towns are known as “tuition towns” with students from many miles around flooding in for classes on Saturdays and Sundays.
Even during Covid, tuition masters petitioned the Government to allow them to go back to these huge mass classes, and obtained a concession to have 50% capacity classes of 500 students!
These tuition classes conducted for students of as early as Year 1, continue until A/L, and are an enormous financial drain for almost all parents.
Poor grading system
The grading system employed in Scholarship, O/L, and A/L exams simply rewards the vomiting out of answers crammed into students’ heads, for the most part. There is little scope allowed for creativity. This has led to Sri Lanka becoming a non-competitive nation globally.
The way forward: Practical solutions
A few days before that, a male teacher was arrested for sexually abusing four six-year-old girls, when their parents sent them for individual tuition classes for the same Scholarship Exam that they would sit in four years’ time.
Meanwhile, employers throughout Sri Lanka have been lamenting for decades that graduates and Advanced Level (A/L) and Ordinary Level (O/L)-qualified young persons possess few skills for employment.
Private and state sector vocational training institutes are filled with hundreds of thousands of youngsters who learnt little in school, despite having good A/L and O/L results. Thus, large numbers of Sri Lankan youth spend their most productive years outside the job market.
The present Sri Lankan educational system, which is focused on A/L and O/L, does not allow children to think and unleash their potential to build up their own future in an innovative, systemic way.
We have an illusion that our kids are advanced in emerging technologies, but their knowledge is more often just imaged on past papers and they know little of technology.
The extraordinary operation of sending children for an exam during Covid underlined the unhealthy attitude towards education in this country, where success in non-innovative exams are deemed to be the yardstick of academic success, despite much of the world moving away from such an antiquated system. Although there was significant grumbling about the holding of the “Shishyathwa” and other exams, many parents nonetheless felt that they had little choice but to put lives at risk and have children take their exams.
Parrot education
Sri Lanka’s current method of education fails children by teaching them as one teaches parrots, not realising that the education system does not inspire or motivate children to think, reason, and activate their capacity for shaping their future.
Sri Lankan teens are taught to learn the parrot way for their O/L and A/L exams, which was once considered a "gold standard" for intelligence testing. School teachers and tuition gurus are using marking schemes published on examination boards' past papers to prepare children in order to be able to replicate answers without understanding subjects in detail.
Background
The education sector in Sri Lanka has grown rapidly over the past decade, but the standard of learning remains unimaginative and misguided. Quality education is more critical than ever in an increasingly knowledge-based world economy. Education must be aimed at encouraging and building children. The call for increased investment in education has been growing since independence, but the issue of its education policy continues to be addressed by an independent Sri Lanka even over six decades after. Distorted national goals in this critical sector indicate low levels of learning.
Sri Lanka does not promote innovative thinking by emphasising rote learning and its strict evaluation system. There are flaws in the rote teaching approach. Research has found that the mathematics, science, and reading abilities of primary and secondary school students have regressed. It has not only long-term consequences, but is an institutionalised procedure as a detrimental rote method. The students, who read, mingle with people, and experience society, culture, and places in which they move, become well rounded. These all form their views and experiences on their educational journey. The less they experience, the less they explore and the more closed their minds remain.
Tuition masters’ “tuition kada”
Mass classes of over 1,000 students are quite normal in cities and large towns across the country. Nugegoda, Gampaha, Kurunegala, Anuradhapura, and many other towns are known as “tuition towns” with students from many miles around flooding in for classes on Saturdays and Sundays.
Even during Covid, tuition masters petitioned the Government to allow them to go back to these huge mass classes, and obtained a concession to have 50% capacity classes of 500 students!
These tuition classes conducted for students of as early as Year 1, continue until A/L, and are an enormous financial drain for almost all parents.
Poor grading system
The grading system employed in Scholarship, O/L, and A/L exams simply rewards the vomiting out of answers crammed into students’ heads, for the most part. There is little scope allowed for creativity. This has led to Sri Lanka becoming a non-competitive nation globally.
The way forward: Practical solutions
- Replace the Scholarship, O/L, and A/L system with a credits-per-course-based system, where children are encouraged to continuously learn, as opposed to cramming and parroting
- Such a system should include a diverse range of subjects up to the end of their schooling, including a wide choice of electives, to enable them to explore different areas and find what they are each talented to pursue
- Replace the current O/L and A/L Z-score system of entry into universities and government jobs with a points system that recognises and rewards sports and extracurricular activities
- Build a better society by giving additional points for activities that benefit society – social service, scouting, innovations, etc.
- By giving points for sports, build a healthier and more competitive society
- Outlaw mass tuition classes. Make teachers provide extra coaching for students of their own schools in the afternoons after regular school hours
- Change the school hours to allow children to come to school by 8.30 a.m. and stay in school until 5.30 p.m., with the last two hours being for sports or extracurricular activities, or extra classes. That would allow parents to pick children up from school after work
- Stop trying to reinvent the wheel, as Sri Lanka often tries to do and fails. Look at global best practices in education in countries that are leading the world in innovation, economic growth, science and technology, etc.
- In all international student assessment programmes, Finland was a frontrunner
- Sri Lanka is not examined under Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and is thus unsure of its student standards
- The school days are shorter (190 days a year)
- The education system of Finland has certain basic values
- Students can choose their educational direction