Goodbye, Dr Kannangara

by Panduka Karunanayake

(June 23, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) It is now obvious that the government plans to have private universities. These will locally satisfy part of the huge demand for university education, possibly saving a significant amount of foreign exchange. But many questions remain, which only time can answer.

Many who favour private universities would find the current situation worth celebrating. But let me warn them. This is not the first time that a strong, popular government tried to introduce private-sector, post-secondary education to our country. The J.R. Jayewardene government, with the excellent stewardship of Dr Stanley Kalpage, did it too, with a new Act in 1978 and several degree-awarding institutions being set up in the 1980s. They proved that affordable, good-quality, private, post-secondary education is feasible in our country.

But as soon as the government became unpopular about a decade later (with R. Premadasa as President and A.C.S. Hameed as minister), we also learnt that good plans can be sacrificed when it is expedient for politicos. While private post-secondary education developed in general, the university component of the plan was discarded to appease state university agitation.

Politicos are not brave: they only hide behind an ephemeral façade of popularity. To the extent that a secretly hatched ‘policy’ cannot be a technically sound document, a non-consensual ‘political’ decision forced down the Opposition’s throat cannot be a sustainable step. Be warned: we may be repeating history, because we haven’t yet learnt from it.

Objectives and strategies

Many people benefited from free education. They reached unimaginably dizzy heights in society, thanks to a meritocracy based on educational achievement, with equally distributed educational opportunity. Their benefactor was Dr C.W.W. Kannangara, who in the 1940s guided our country to a new era: "We shall be able to say that we found education the patrimony of the rich and left it the inheritance of the poor."

His objective was to build a just, meritocratic and advanced society using education as a tool – what the Morrill Act did for the nascent United States in the 1860s. He carefully invented three strategies for this: vernacular education, central schools and universal free education.

The elite found that openly challenging the objective was not practical, due to periodic elections. Instead, with passing years, they gradually undermined the strategies.

While the first generation of vernacular students was growing up in schools in the 1940s and 1950s, the elitist, English-educated academia in the University of Ceylon refused to change their ways to prepare for them. They used institutional autonomy (which covered university admissions and medium of instruction) to maintain the status quo. Eventually, the Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara pirivenas had to be hurriedly converted to universities to accommodate the vernacular students. The tussle between the elitist academia and the successive, post-1956 governments erupted in the 1960s, and a new Act took autonomy away.

Simultaneously, central schools were being underfunded and undermined. Science laboratories became the preserve of elitist, urban schools. (At that time, university entrance examinations had a crucial, practical component.) The children of the rural masses, who were misled along the garden path up to the Advanced Level, had no option but to turn to arts and commerce streams. To accommodate them, the Colombo campus held lectures at the Colombo Race Course, and the ‘vishva vidyalaya’ (university) became known as the ‘ashva vidyalaya’ (equine college). By the late 1960s, we had an excess of arts and commerce graduates – leading to the 1971 JVP insurrection – and a shortage of science graduates – contributing to failure of industrialization.

When the ‘hoi polloi’ graduated, the private sector devised ways and means to keep them out. Employment no longer followed graduation, and instead followed newly invented criteria: old school ties, the ‘It’s not what you know but whom you know’ principle, etc. Apparently you were ‘suitable’ if you had played cricket or rugger for school, but not if you had played football or volleyball.

Biting the hand that feeds

Even the beneficiaries of the scheme were not grateful for it. They undermined the very meritocracy that lifted them to their heights, to keep the gains within their progeny. They did not even serve the masses, choosing instead to bask in their newfound glory, by pretending to be well-born because up until then, the well-educated were indeed also the well-born. While education was distributed widely, the dividends of education were becoming distributed increasingly sparsely.

The masses eventually grew tired of the tirade, and preferred the foul-speaking, law-flouting, easily accessible politico to the overtly meritocratic, covertly elitist social institutions, for solving their problems.

If the beneficiaries of the Kannangara era – now embedded in high places in the Cabinet, ministries, universities, commissions and councils – cannot see the need to preserve it, how could others?

State university graduates were fine, as long as they were routinely absorbed into the public service. When that became saturated, agitation and hunger strikes in front of the Fort railway station entered the nation’s permanent landscape.

The students and graduates guarded the state monopoly in university education with their lives – literally – because they knew that if that was lost, all is lost. The argument was that anyone who deserved a university education would automatically qualify for it at the Advanced Level. Private education was fine up to university level, for instance for tuition classes in preparation for the AL – but as soon as the ALs was over, education must be completely free!

They invented a clever trick for this. They defined ‘fair’ university admission by the same criterion that defined them as a group, namely the AL mark – just like a Brahmin defines a Brahmin as a person born to pure Brahmin parents.

Mixing up

Everybody ignored the fact that we should preserve Dr Kannangara’s objective, not his strategies. Objectives are sacred; strategies must suit the times, and must change with them if the objectives are to remain preserved.

The elite undermined two of the three strategies, and with that, the objective was as good as gone. The masses hung on to the remaining strategy, their remaining lifeline. When their agitation was strong and commandeered mass support, governments listened. We sacrificed the objective for the sake of preserving a strategy. We preserved the state monopoly on university education for the sake of appeasing the generations of graduates led up to a trap. It served only the state graduates, not the country, but it was convenient.

The elite found a way out: they flew out to foreign universities. Eventually, foreign universities came in, as state universities would not assist the private sector. They came as BOI projects, as coming in as universities was out of the question. We therefore failed to have a regulated, quality-assured private university sector (as envisaged by Dr Kalpage) that could have served our middle class – and had instead an unregulated, unmonitored one that we may use at our own peril, including the overseas option.

In a few years, the situation reached tragic proportions. In 2008, we spent US$ 170 million (over Rs 18 billion) on foreign universities; in 2007, we spent Rs 12 billion on state universities. In other words, we were now spending more on foreign universities than on our universities! Hence, the unavoidable step taken by a popular, powerful government in economic difficulties: open the way for private universities within the country, so that the foreign exchange drain can be reduced.

One would like to think that economic policies should fit political objectives (‘political’ in the broad sense), but we have political policies fitting economic objectives. Sri Lanka has lost her way in politics, and is at the mercy of her economics. That is why there are so many unanswered questions. Are we still committed to egalitarianism?

Whither the state graduate and the state university? Private universities might offer good degrees, but can they offer everything that a society needs from its universities? If they cannot, where are we heading?

The end of an era

It is more than likely that, with passing years, the state education system from kindergarten to university will become a dead end trap for the poor and the private education system will become a pathway for upward social mobility (or immobility, once you get there). In other words, we will soon enter the post-Kannangara era: a meaningful education will revert from an inheritance of the poor to a patrimony of the rich.

Under better circumstances, things might have been different. We could have made the most of Dr Kannangara’s vision, and preserved his objective by reflecting on and changing our strategies at the right time.

We might have developed a robust meritocracy. That might have helped us advance economically. When the global demand for graduates was emerging with the knowledge-based industries, and when the state realized that it cannot supply that demand, we might have set up private universities with state support and regulation. We might have utilized our people’s great faith in education to propel our country forward, using global trends to our advantage. We might have been part of the Asian Miracle. Economic advancement might have made insurrections and separatism unnecessary. But all that was not to be.

As we stand on the brink of a new era, one thing is clear. The passing era has been one of selfishness, deceit, and skulduggery…completely overshadowed by the magnanimity, wisdom and devotion of one person: Dr C.W.W. Kannangara.