DO WE EDUCATE OUR KIDS THE RIGHT WAY?

Here is a quotation I have always remembered because it seems so very apt after 50 years or more of being a teacher.

- BY GOOLBAI GUNASEKARA

"All true education should be a delayed action time bomb assembled in classrooms for explosion at a later date."

In short, true education should instill a desire to learn even after one has finished with school and University exams. The necessity to get the highest marks possible so as to impress everybody - or at least to allow your parents to boast to their relatives how brilliantly you are doing academics-wise, should no longer be the factor motivating a true wish to acquire a more in-depth knowledge of whatever subject fascinates you. In my case it is History. It is a captivating subject and one of which I KNOW I can never learn too much.

I seriously question our methods of teaching these days. How keen are young graduates of the Universities of Sri Lanka to continue studying (or at least reading) just for the sake of just gaining knowledge and not because there is an exam at the end of it? Or how about school children? Do they want to read for knowledge or is TV/ social media their only provider of outside classroom learning?

Obviously Sri Lankan graduates who have been educated in the Sinhala medium are not going to find it easy to continue the learning process since they do not read English too well and all the most interesting publications in any subject are in English. I am told that translations of any knowledge from European or Asian languages into English used to be 80%.