Why the Grade 5 scholarship examination?

The scholarship examination was part of a broader programme. Until well into the 1960s, secondary schools thrived in ‘urban’ areas. When I was in school, a child wanting to study beyond Grade 5 had to attend a secondary school, sometimes several and often many miles away from home, in a town that required resources for transportation, boarding and lodging near the school. (Martin Wickremasinghe and Gunadasa Amarasekera both wrote about this feature in their novels).

- BY USVATTE-ARATCHI

It is in the news that the Ministry of Education is seriously reconsidering the case for the Grade 5 Scholarship Examination.

It is wise of the Minister of Education to undertake such reconsideration, given that the examination has lived, I think usefully, for more than sixty years. Long life itself is not a sufficient reason for a longer life; it may have outlived its usefulness and there may be more productive and fairer alternative solutions to the problems it was initially designed to solve. Or, the problems themselves may have changed. Has the Grade 5 Scholarship Examination outlived its usefulness? There are no longitudinal studies of the lives of children who won these scholarships, and one has to depend on anecdotal accounts.

The first 5th standard scholarship examination was held in 1944 and my sister won a scholarship and later volunteered to go to the Training College in Maharagama and become a Specialist English Teacher, so that I could go to university. I took the second Scholarship Examination in 1945 and joined my sister at Hikkaduwa Central School in January 1946. The case of these two siblings was repeated many times over to become a significant social force. The overthrow of the ‘Colombo elite’, who later became little more than a gang of thieves, from political power and the election to office of men and women from entirely new social strata, is an outcome of the social dynamics partly driven by ‘free education’. Can those social forces function without the fillip provided by the 5th standard scholarship examination?