Power of the point in educational reforms

WE are into yet another round of education reforms. As someone who has experienced the implementation of reforms —the psyche as a student is you have no clue about the philosophy or the reasons for reforms you just wade through the process for better or worse!

- By Prof. Ajith de Alwis

Tnow like to discuss ‘reforming education’ after almost 40 years on the delivery side of tertiary education.

I remember being among the first to face the Grade 5 scholarship examination and subsequently the first to face the new National Certificate of General Education (NCGE) and the subsequent HNCE process. Some of our parents went in search of Kshetra Poth! which was requested for social studies, in bookshops when their children were instructed to have such a book. It took some time for many to realise that this is a practical collection that you must produce yourself and not something that is there for sale in a bookshop. Today of course any bookshop near a school has collections of feathers, seeds, flowers, leaves and any other request a teacher may ask a student to do.

Homework, experiments and field studies have become a simple issue of purchasing, rote learning of steps and fulfilling an assessment requirement — resultant learning Zero! Clips on the media shows the island toppers in Grade 5 saying that they did a bunch of past papers and that was it! They say learners inherit the earth... for Sri Lanka sadly it is different! Reading is hitting rock bottom. What was the last book you read? Students look up to the sky!

I see adults having three choices when they see or hear on educational reforms. You may get the urge to go back to school; you may want to pull your child out of the school, and you may give up having children — you do not want them to suffer! Researching on education and writing from an economic perspective has led to a number of Nobel awards in Economics. Policies on education has been perennial favourites with politicians, simply because the value of education in society and for human progress (https://www.ft.lk/columns/Education-Education-Education/4-724003).