Financial Times

Where have all the flowers gone?
By Random Access Memory (RAM)
When RAM was a university student in the sixties, he had the fortune of coming under the wings of a very dynamic but a most misunderstood professor of economics in the late Professor F.R. Jayasuriya. Prof. FR as he was fondly called was an English major who later took to economics and was more significantly an out of the box thinker.

He had with foresight introduced into the economics teaching curricula minor specialisations such as agricultural economics, estate management and valuation and industrial management. He had to fight the then academia in introducing these courses, since most of them even then, sat in the comfort zones of their own known domains. It was also unfortunate that there were only very few takers for the courses, as they were at the time, thought to be pipe dream schemes of an 'up in the clouds' professor, when indeed the almost eccentric and lovable Prof. FR to introduce these courses certainly had seen beyond his own nose. He had a vision and a dream.

A decade or so later in 1977, when RAM himself was teaching economics at the same university he wrote a paper for the faculty seminar with the title "A soul search by a teacher of economics in Sri Lanka". It questioned and challenged the validity of the mainstream economics syllabi that was taught at the time and pointed out that it was in the main, irrelevant to what was happening in the real world around us.

It stated that there needed to be a link between the real world and what was being taught. More so that students needed to be given an understanding of what was happening in the world of business. It touched on the need for university teachers to equip themselves with knowledge of real world business.

Some thirty years later, in the very recent past, RAM attended a workshop of planners of education, where they listed issues that need to be addressed to make our education more wholesome and the educated, employable. The irony is that there was very little difference in the rationale that late Prof. FR presented in the mid- sixties to justify introducing the courses and issues that were presented by the new gurus in planning.

The issues pointed to the need to overhaul the syllabi for there is a misfit between the market for jobs and what was being taught. University teachers needed to go beyond the spoon feeding techniques of dictating pre-prepared notes to students, to themselves understanding the realities of the real world of business. These issues have remained issues with very little or nothing done to find solutions. If at all, we have gone back in time and have degenerated our education system.

Remember the American folk singer Pete Seiger, who in the sixties sang the memorable song "Little boxes" referring to two generations of engineers, doctors and other professionals who built for themselves very secure 'ticky tacky' houses of little boxes in red, green, blue and yellow. He was calling for the creation of more wholesome human beings and not merely human work machines without diversity and creativity.

Just two weeks ago, a new batch of the cream of the crop of our 'waiting to blossom' intelligentsia qualified to enter our universities, after the release of the 'A' Level results. The hopes and aspirations of the many thousands who now await entry into our many universities must not once again go waste. They must have the right to realise their full potential. The many delays, inertia, the strikes and irrelevance in the syllabi taught mainly in the arts streams, the exposure of teachers to the world of business through more intense links with industry and commerce, all need to move fast beyond the issues stage on to the action stage.

There is talk of another major redoing of the education system with a $ 50 million World Bank package. Let us hope that the leaders of education get it right this time and that this effort does not become yet another exercise of tinkering with the system expending fat fees for foreign consultants and their local counterparts. Reforms in university education must not be geared to meet the needs of the University Grants Commission or to foster its continued existence.

May be it is time that we thought out of the box and considered allowing each of the universities autonomy to compete with each other for seeking excellence. Direct funding, systems to ensure transparency, performance management audits incorporating indicators to measure effectiveness and relevance of the output may all be incorporated in the system.

With nearly 30,000 university graduates now among the unemployed, we see the waste that has been the hallmark of the system of yore. What we need now is action and fast effective action to make sure that the flowers of talent that bloom don't wither away fast. We sang 'Where have all the flowers gone' for far too long now.

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