Rajpal's Column

27th September 1998

Crippled minds or Boyagoda's schooldays?

By Rajpal Abeynayake

The subject of schooling must still be ex tremely high on the agenda of parents, or so we would think.

Consider, for instance, the fracas that unfolded, and keeps unfolding at one of the bluest and the best of educational institutions in this land. The authorities there are now embroiled in a controversy over who will succeed as the head of the school (quaintly known as the Warden in those parts). Parents are at the apex of this controversy, which has now been dragged to court.

Tom Brown's schooldays are of course over. No doubt that parents who send their offspring to institutions, even those which are modelled after British public schools, have now to adjust to the changing trends in education in these parts of the world. Some of these trends seem to be endemic to Sri Lanka, if you think about it. No child-abuse specialist, for instance, seems to have done a serious study on how much "cramming'' (tuition in the respectable argot) constitutes of child abuse. Though columnists are given to generalisations, it would be a very safe generalisation to say that most children, especially in Colombo, are now robbed of their childhood because of the "private lessons'' that they are expected to follow after school hours.

Newspaper feature writers may have attempted, on and off, to get a measure of these trends, with the help of a few educators and psychologists — good people such as Jezima Ismail who always have something to say on these matters.

Such articles predictably come up with the conclusion that "tuition'' has become a necessary evil, and that students (children as small as six ) are pushed towards tuition by performance-minded parents.

But, buried in such regular treatments of the subject are the larger cultural underpinnings of the "tuition mania,'' and assorted other education trends, especially trends which are manifest in Colombo in particular. On the larger canvas, these trends in Colombo, trivial though they may sound at first, are substantial. For example, the business of school buses in Colombo has died. Gone are the days when Tom Brown's successor, Thilan Boyagoda, got into a red colour school bus — bag, baggage, torn shirt and all — and headed for home after another day of growing up.

It is almost as if all that type of romance associated with schoolboyhood or schoolgirlhood has disappeared. It will be a fair challenge to the reader to try and find one school bus in the entirety of Colombo in the city proper, these days. At least a bus which in the conventional way engages in the transport of schoolboys to and from school.

Instead, school buses have now been replaced by "school vans". If you must ask "so what's the big difference?'', then I think you are on another planet.

School vans operate at a price, and are not run under subsidy, like the good old red colour CTB subsidised schoolbuses were.

Parents fork out an enormous amount of money for these school vans which have grown so voluminous in number that they clog up entire streets during the afternoon and morning school rush hours.

Never mind that tin-can school vans lack the romance and the spaciousness of the good old schoolbuses. What's more important is that they are one more manifestation of the mercenary culture that has taken root in the educational ethos of this country.

If the school van business is analyzed, it may be correct that part of the reason for the need for these unconformtable vehicles is the decline of welfarism. The state subsidised CTB is no more, and therefore, there are no buses now to be assigned for schools.

But, that does not seem to be the entire story. Parental apathy in getting a system of school buses organised, in part is probably due to the wasted values that are entrenched in the urban sub-culture.

For instance, most parents who can afford it (and some of those who can't) would prefer to send a car per child during school hours, adding to the traffic snarls. Though there should be no law against parents sending cars for children if they can afford it, a look at how the school transport business happens is an indication that it is all a part of wasted value system.

In a word, the entire educational system is mercenary. It is so, from the time parents start looking for schools, and forking out "donations'' to the tune of lakhs of rupees to get their children into reasonably good schools, government run or private.

To make the argument as plain as possible, all these were not trends that were present in the system, say, 15 years ago. No key money for school admissions, no huge amounts for school van rides, no pervasive tuition industry for which parents have to spend another few cool thousands. (Tuition was not absent 15 years ago. But it was a lesser evil than it is now, when all students, almost from toddler age are socially expected to go for tuition classes.)

Are these grotesquely crippled minds then, which make use of children as a social tool to show off their competitive urges? In societies in which it is perceived that there is something to be gained by showing that you are richer than the other Johnny, people have found odd ways to show that they are more affluent. In America, before the depression, the owning classes threw parties at which cigarettes wrapped in hundred dollar bills were smoked by the nonchalant rich.

Traditionally, luxury cars and other devices have been made use of by people to advertise their affluence.

But, certainly, Colombo's trend now seems to be to advertise wealth through their offspring. Ergo, the race to send a car per child, to send children for coaching on everything from ballet to elocution to speech and drama training. The trend is so entrenched in some of the big schools, that parents feel compelled to host birthday parties for children at five star hotels, just so that their kids don't feel "inferior'' to the Jinadasa's, who had a birthday party at the Hilton. (The Jinadasa's in turn went to the Hilton to keep up with the Joneses- those snooty expatriates from Australia.)

So that's schooling in Sri Lanka, where free education is one of the shining achievements of the welfare state. It is mercenary , but what's funny is that one generation of crippled minds (to borrow the Susantha Gunetilleke characterisation) is engaged in a major struggle, to breed another generation of crippled minds at great cost ( After all, school vans, tuition don't come cheap).

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