C. Wijeyawickrema, LL.B., Ph.D.
Introduction
This essay was written 20 years ago. It was
a reply to an essay which had strange ideas such as JVP was wicked because its
members did not know English. There were several such odd points covered in the
essay. But strangely, the point on JVP and English does so closely with the
decision to make law college English.
Only thing permanent in this world is
impermanence or change. Therefore, after 20 years I do not think C. A.
Chandraprema has not changed at least some of his views about this human world
we live in. I must apologize to him for re-opening an old wound by re-printing
it. My purpose is to let the council of legal education (CLE) know that the country
is not full of idiots to accept this kind of stupid decisions.
The vice principal of the law college is
teaching English to law students. Teaching a second language is not a joke,
some way to get an extra-income. It requires professional training. There are
degree programs to teach/train how to teach a foreign language. A pass or a
credit p has ass is not how one becomes and English language teacher. I wonder
if there was an assessment of this English teacher’s performance by his
students, and the principal used students’ comments as feedback for the teacher
to improve his service.
CLE has a duty to let the country know why
it took this decision. The impact of this decision is to prevent rural, poor
students entering law college and make it again an academy for the rich,
English-speaking kids. Reading English books is good but how does it affect a
Sinhala-speaking lawyer’s ability, skill, and power of interpretation of laws
in Sinhala? Was the corruption we find in the legal establishment, the
exploitation of poor and innocent clients done jointly by the two lawyers of
the opposite sides under an adversarial system of justice and perhaps, with the
implied consent of the judge, due to a lack of their English language
proficiency?
CLE should develop a strong English teaching
program with labs or make sure students go to such programs in another
university and get them a working knowledge in English so that they can read
and understand books written in English. They should not be allowed to proceed until
they pass a test of translating a one or two pages of a law text into Sinhala
and vice versa.
Important text could be translated into
Sinhala (Tamil students have no such problem as Tamilnad is full of such books)
by giving contracts to retired lawyers, teachers etc. who are fluent in both languages
(legal background is not necessary for this).
The general question of giving students a
working knowledge in English is a national problem that the officialdom has
failed to do despite wasting tons of resources.
CLE’s attempt to take the nation back to
pre-1956 era is like the plan (conspiracy) to make Sinhalaya, Sri Lankan, using
the newly designed birth certificate, so that in 100 years there will be no
Sinhala nation. All these fit in with the Orumitthanadu balkanization plan and
the anti-Mahavamsa project. With the
rumors around that Born Again agents have infiltrated state machinery including
the Aluthkade, CLE needs to tell the country why it took this unnecessary step
to clear any unwarranted suspicions on it.
And, CLE should have non-lawyer members, just
like the need for non-medical persons on the Medical Council.
====================================
(This article appeared on the Island on
April 13, 2001 (Sinhala-Tamil New Year’s Day).
Gurulugomi to the Rescue: re-Enthronement of the English
Language
…Who could deny that a single shelf of
a good European library was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia.” Macaulay (1835) – Macaulay:
The Shaping of the Historian, by John Clive, Random House, 1973, p.372
Mr. Chandraprema’s (CAC) paper titled In
the footsteps of Gurulugomi..” (The Island,
January 29), is an example of the sixteen dreams that puzzled the king Pasenadi
Kosol. To understand the genesis of CAC’s paper I asked myself a question, Why
was CAC picked up by an NGO to speak on this topic?” Several subsequent
writings of CAC throw some helpful light in this regard. CAC was in the past an
active socialist and had also served on the Chamber of Commerce (N.M., Leslie
and Colvin did the same thing). He
maintains that the Sinhalayas are lazy (the Robert Knox complex). He thinks
that Sri Lanka should copy
the hire and fire” labour laws from the U.S.
(he should ask Ralph Nader, the third-party candidate at the last U.S.
presidential election on this matter). He implies that the JVP was a murderous
clan because its members do not speak English, although he now accepts that
Richard de Zoysa was behind the JVP killings of bus drivers. Apparently, the
NGO did their homework.
The retired professor of education, Ranjith
Ruberu, recently had an article on this topic titled Hasty changeover [is]
unwarranted,” (The Island, January 19).
How did the professor reconcile this with his previous article in the
Island, The need to make English compulsory for university admissions?”
Because those who routinely promote English ignore two important concepts— proficiency
in a second language and barriers to learning English in public schools—
it is useful to ask a further question of who is promoting English and why? If
English teachers trade union is promoting English, one can understand it, if
they do not neglect their classroom duty before giving private tuition. But if
globalization, McDonalds coming to Colombo, the mushrooming business of
international schools, an ethnic war with a terrorist group, unemployment,
youth suicide, corruption, bomb culture and enrichment of some via military
supply contracts are some how connected with lack of English knowledge, then
those promoters are simply dishonest. If ability to speak English is the path
to Nirvana, then those countries where English is the mother tongue should not
have poverty, unemployment or high school kids taking guns to schools!
Pali and Gujarati as Foreign Languages
Sinhala villagers have enough problems
already and they do not need a new Pali problem created by an NGO seminar. They
had a Mysore
dhal/Bombay onion problem during Lalith’s time. But imagine the eerie feeling a
Buddhist could go through by differentiating Pali as a foreign language?
Recently, when my mother-in-law was dying, my wife and her brother were at the
hospital bedside chanting pirith. I do not know whether any one of the three
was thinking at that time that pirith was foreign object like Kentucky Fried
Chicken or a McDonald’s hamburger. In the good old days people used to chant
pirith when chased by a ferocious dog or walking past a cemetery in the
night. Do we consider the Buddha, or the
children of King Dharmashoka, Arhants Mahinda and Sangamitta, as foreigners?
The Tooth Relic was from a Pali and not from a Sanskrit mouth. For centuries
Pali was the language of Buddhism just like math has been the language of
modern science. It was a dead language required for those who wanted to become
Buddhist priests.
The Diaries of Anagarika Dharmapala
If we look at languages from a
utilitarian, proficiency perspective, instead of who is not a fool viewpoint,
then we do not have to cite Ven. Anagarika Dharmapala’s diaries as evidence.
The concept of proficiency strips English of its Kaduwa aspect from the Sinhala
politics (Youth Commission Report, page xvii). It becomes just a language, a
tool like a typewriter, fax machine, computer software or German. Did Anagarika
Dharmapala (1864-1933) use English to show that he was an educated” person in
the tradition of Gurulugomi or the senior civil servant Amara Hewa Madduma? May be Mrs. Annie Besant- with whom the young
David was pleading for a chance to go to the Himalayas to meet with secret
adepts- asked him to do so, before she found the future Krisnamurthy in the
beaches of south India. Or was there a police order for him to keep a record of
his daily activities? The point is, we just cannot speculate on such things.
For example, I prefer to write this essay in Sinhala and send it to Divaina,
the Sinhala daily” but it is not practicable for me to do so. I did it once and
did not know what had happened to it. Does this mean that my intention is to
join the educated” class? Does this diary-business put him in the category of
a present-day politician? Didn’t he play an honest game? Just like Simon
Bolivar (1783-1830), the liberator of South America finally left his country of
birth, Venezuela in frustration, Dharmapala, the peaceful fighter also left the
then Ceylon in disgust, vowing never to come back, so I heard.
This diary business reminds a previous
debate by one Mr. Amaradasa Fernando, who commented on the inability of the
late Professor F. R. Jayasooriya to write in Sinhala (The Island, June/July
1999). Why is that a group of NGO-sponsored people are not writing about
politicians such as R. G. Senanayake or K. M. P. Rajaratne, but target persons
like Professor F. R. Jayasooriya, Dharmapala, Munidasa Cumaratunga or the
Christian-born James D’Alwis (1823-78)? One in this group calculated the
percentage of Mahavamsa kings who killed a father or a brother to get to the
throne! Could we expect that one day this group will cite that Dr. Ananda
Coomaraswamy was married four times, each time to a white woman? Or after done
with the first list of targets, would they then cite G. P. Malalasekara, P. de.
S. Kularatne and S. A. Wickremasinghe, for
marrying white women?
Who is an educated person?
There was a famous case in which lawyers of
an American newspaper tried to prove that Henry Ford was an uneducated” man.
But Henry Ford changed the modern world. During the Premadasa regime some
professors were talking about the clique of seven, seven ministers who had
seventh grade education. When an apple fell on Newton’s head, fortunately he did not ask the
wrong question, Why did this apple fall on my head?” in which case some say he
would have written a long novel. Instead, he asked, Why do apples fall?”
Because promoters of English do not ask the proficiency and barrier-related
questions, they write about Pali, diaries and Gurulugomi. The fifth verse in the Subhasitaya lists as stupid those who did not know Pali, Sanskrit
plus TAMIL. Stupidity is also covered in the last verse of the Lokopakaraya.
But the question is whether one becomes an
educated” person simply because he or she is bilingual. During the days of Sir
John, there were many taxi drivers and Colombo
seven Aayas (maids) who were bi-lingual. I knew people who spoke English at
home but spell court of law” as coat of law.” Despite the story of Amawatura or Subhasitaya in the past, the pre-independence Ceylon treated those who knew
Sinhala and English as stupid. Only a handful of white men did not agree with
what Macaulay had to say about the Asian heritage. Rhys Davids (1881-1922) of
the Ceylon Civil Service, son of a Christian minister, was one of them and was
fired from his job because of his strange” views. Sir William Jones (1783), the first president
of the Asiatic Society of Bengal was another. Sir D. B. Jayatilaka was an Abittaya (temple servant) to Marxists
because he had his early education in a Buddhist temple. Colonial rulers
deported him to Delhi so that the seventh-grade, English speaking people who
did not know Sinhala or Pali or Gujarati could rule the country. Cumaratunga
Munidasa (1887-1944) was not qualified to entrust with the task of preparing
the Sinhalese Encyclopedia. Ruskin Fernando who contested the Moratuwa seat was
bi-lingual and he tried to say that he loved his urine-land (muthra)
meaning his motherland (maathru)!
Until Colonel Olcott and the Buddhist
Theosophical Society came to the forefront in the1880s, it was not Gurulugomi
but Macaulay and the likes of Sir Ivor Jennings, trusted advisor to prime
ministers, who influenced the education policy in Ceylon. In 1804, just two
years after the coastal Ceylon
became a crown colony, the London Mission Society started schools to convert
children. Two other examples would be sufficient to show the Sir
John-kicking-M.S. Themis-on the steps of the parliament building” (compare with
the Ratnatunge attack on the Asoka Vidyalaya cricket players) mentality of Ceylon.
If a person was sick for more than fourteen days a medical certificate from an
Ayurvedic physician was not accepted. It must be from a western doctor or from
a hospital [written in English?]. Those who came out of the English
teacher-training college were paid a higher salary than those who came from the
Sinhala medium training colleges. Sinhala became Bible Sinhala,” and a kitchen
language, the same way that Buddhism became a kitchen religion. Among the many
survival strategies, some Sinhala people had two first names, one
Sinhala-Buddhist (Aryan?) and one western-English (Christian?). They were
Christians in the office and Buddhists in the kitchen! The great religious
debate at Panadura (April 1873) took place under such circumstances.
The International Irrigation Management
Institute is in Sri Lanka because Sri Lanka had a sophisticated irrigation
water supply system in the ancient world. Who were these ancient irrigation
workers? Were they bi-lingual? Some Marxists branded king Dutugemunu as a fool
of bricks” for building the Ruwanvali Maha Saya. Yet these same Marxists
make trips to Egypt
to see the great pyramids! I think a person who knows that he does not know is
an educated person. An educated person knows the art of living in an
impermanent world. Martin Wickremasinghe had so vividly described in his
Apegama that the guru-gedara and the village temple were the centers of
education and educated people in Sri Lanka, before, during and
towards the end of the colonial period. Contrary to what the new NGO-oriented
writers think, British governors took full advantage of such native institutions
like the caste system, village council, village headman, village tanks and the
temple-based village education, all in the name of peace and good governance of
the colony.
Colonial Education Policy
As children we
studied the colonial education policy from Horace Perera’s history textbook,
Ceylon Under the Western Rule.” For a detailed history, the best source is
chapter 12 Indian Education: The Minute” of Clive’s book on Macaulay. There
were two opposing views. Engrafting” Western knowledge upon Indian cultural
traditions by means of Sanskrit and Arabic and downward filtration,” the
creation of an educated elite who would themselves become teachers to other
great mass of poor Indian people. The latter policy had an evangelical and
utilitarian bias. So, Macaulay said, we
must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us
and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and
colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Who
could deny that NM, Leslie, Colvin, Lalith, Gamini, JRJ, Dudley,
Ranil, Neelan-GL and Chandrika did not qualify as grand children of Macaulay?
Since its top
priority was making profits the colonial government left education in the hands
of religious and private organizations. As summed up by Nehru, colonial masters
supported a policy of education for clerks.” In 1851, Radha Kanta Dev, a
progressive Calcutta
merchant warned against a system, whereby, ..with a smattering knowledge of
English, youths are weaned from the plough, the axe and the loom, to render
them ambitious only for the clerkships for which hosts would besiege the
government and mercantile offices…” Dev favored agricultural and industrial schools,
where skills could be taught. For him, the prerequisite for these was a solid
vernacular education. Lord Curzon who divided Bengal
into two in 1905, made the same point half a century later (Clive, p. 416). We
need to look at Sri Lanka’s
economic problems today from Dev’s and Lord Curzon’s wisdom and not from CAC’s
opinion of a vernacular disaster. In the USA alone, in each major city, dozens
of vernacular educated Sri Lankans—engineers, doctors, chemists, physicists,
professors and arts graduates— have successfully competed with those whose
mother tongue is English in the latter’s own turf by acquiring a simple working
knowledge in English. English did not give Sri Lankan Americans the brain,
intelligence, creativity, or the power of analytical thinking. English was only
a vehicle, and they do not carry this raft on their shoulders after crossing
the river. Here then is a proven simple model that Sri Lanka should follow.
As Gandhi once
said, it was nothing less than scandalous that people should devote the best
years of their lives to mastering a foreign tongue.” Buddha said twenty-five
hundred years ago that one’s mother tongue was the most appropriate medium of
education. Those who think Sinhala is a poor language should try to translate
into English the following line of a verse in the Subahsitaya, pin
mada putun siyayak laduwat nisaru.” Sir D. B. Jayatilaka, who opposed the
introduction of universal suffrage, was convinced that originality of thought
was inextricably bound with one’s own mother tongue. He asked, we have had
English education in this country over a century…but has anyone left a single
book in English verse or prose which will survive a generation?” (Legislative
Council Debates, 1928:368). As cited in Professor K. N. O. Dharmadasa’s book,
Language, Religion and Ethnic Assertiveness (1992, p. 215), Ananda
Coomaraswamy, who was fluent in ten languages, went even further to endorse
strongly, the link between one’s creative and intellectual development and
his/her mother tongue. Martin Wickremasinghe, who learned his Sinhala at
Koggala showed so much creativity. What did the Peradeniya honours graduates
who studied Sinhala language in English language produce? Some of them became
civil servants such as Charles Abeysekera (English, Sanskrit and Latin?) who
sat on top of all the state industrial corporations for decades.
Sri
Lanka has no
resources!
This brings us to CAC’s next theory that
Sri Lanka has no resources. He should tell this to a Japanese or a Korean and
ask them to buy the island! Resources are not, they become.” A geography
professor could perhaps enlighten CAC on this topic. But after living in this
resource rich USA for 21
years, I think Sri Lanka
has more than enough resources to be a healthy-happy nation. The problem has
been the UNP-SLFP leaders and the Colombo
class. For example, when you think of the money paid to baby-sitters and to
psychiatrists for mental stress in America, the extended family-net and the
Buddhist way of life in Sri Lanka are two important resources. Agriculture and
industry are the two legs of a country helping each other, and a garment
industry based on shiploads of cloth or yarn converted to tons of exported
shirts and pants cannot change this basic truth. About 30 years ago E. F.
Schumacher, opened our eyes to the path we should have followed in his book
Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. But politicians and their
catchers and officers cannot get commissions unless they invite big projects.
Sri Lanka is poor, and the university educated
are unemployed not because they do not know English, but the country is lacking
leaders with wisdom and dedication. What the UNP and SLFP did to the country is
candidly summarized by the Sri Lankan prime minister in the presence of the
president .. All parties utter lies in their election manifestos and the party
which utter better and more effective lies is the side that wins the
election..” (Daily News, February
14, 2001). While the old Cinnamon
Garden class is decaying,
new types of classes are emerging in the Kotte-Nawala-Madivela area. Now people
make money via politics, war supply contracts, NGOs, and commissions from
foreign aid contracts. Their children could go at least to an Indian university
and when they come back foreign companies prefer to hire them instead of the
local graduates. The presumption is that those with an overseas education
represent a higher class and are less radical and less nationalistic. It is an
irony that poor Sri Lankans go to the Middle East as maids, clean toilets, and
remit hard foreign exchange to Sri Lanka. Rich peoples’ children who cannot
enter a Sri Lankan university use that money under the World Bank orders of a
free-liberal economy to go to foreign universities.
Vernacular Disaster and the American Civil War
In Kent, Ohio I met a Physics student who
got an assistantship to come for higher studies because he had a physics degree
in the Sinhala medium. If his English was tested, he had no chance of coming
here. But he was blaming SWRD for removing English from the university. A group
of dedicated Sri Lankans fought to open the doors of the university to the
common people of Sri Lanka.
When the plug was removed, big-fat-rich kids from Colombo and other big cities had no chance.
In the early days university admission decisions were made after a personal
interview. And at the interview, as reported by Felix Dias B, Sir Ivor asked
him, Since your father is a judge of the supreme court are you also planning
to be a judge of the supreme court?” to which FDB replied, No, I want to be
the vice chancellor of the university so that I could select students.” They
were just scratching each other’s backs! While Royal, St. Thomas and St Joseph
dropped out of the scene, village students with 8 distinctions at O.L. flooded
the university. With so many qualified students the government added a second
arts section in Colombo
in 1962, nicknamed the Gopallawa faculty.” In 1962, those who were losing
their post-independence privileges staged a military coup, allegedly with Dudley
and Sir Oliver’s knowledge. P. de. S. Kularatne’s son-in-law, Stanley
Senanayake saved the country.
What happened to the Philippine Islands,
Africa or to some South American cultures did not happen in Sri Lanka, because of
life-sacrificing acts of Walane (Panadura) Siddharta (1811-68), whose wisdom
resulted in the establishment of Vidyodaya (1873) and Vidyalankara (1875)
Pirivenas, Migettuwatte Gunananda (1823-90) Hikkaduwe Sumangala (1827-1911),
Colonel Olcott, and many others. It is
true that a postal peon’s son could become a famous Sinhala Civil Servant
(Ananda Guruge) or a poor school clerk’s son from Panadura could become a
Peradeniya professor (I. D. S. Weerawardena), and some children of school
principals, postmasters and village landowners had an opportunity to enter the
University of Ceylon. But the Kannangara Free Education Reforms did not reach
the masses until the people’s revolution in 1956 and the decision to teach in
Sinhala and Tamil in the university. In the 1960s, to supplement the university
bursary system, Dr. N. M. Perera, added a university students’ bank loan scheme
through the People’s Bank.
But it was not an easy victory. We all know
what Sir Nicholas, the dean of medical faculty told F. R. Jayasooriya when the
former was approached to teach medicine in Sinhala, first go and teach your
Sinhala in Sinhala and then come to me.” In this effort FR had the backing of
I. D. S. W, who pioneered teaching political science in Sinhala, with the
support of his English wife, until his untimely death by a misdiagnosis of
chickenpox. But professor F. R. Jayasooriya, once told me that at a much later
stage, when the movement had reached the point of no return, a person non other
than R.G. Senanayake asked him, Is it really possible to teach science
(medicine) in Sinhala?” FR should have cited the king Buddhadasa, the Russian
doctors or the Jews medical researchers in Israel. Which is the language of
medicine, English, Russian or Hebrew?
The language of medicine in Ceylon was class privilege and
money. Private medical schools and private universities are not bad ideas per
se if, we tell the real reason behind them. People who get rich by just means
taking risks must be allowed to enjoy their wealth. Is this against Buddhism?
But one should not say that the French enjoy justice and fairness under the
French law because both the rich and the poor are allowed to sleep under the
bridges in Paris.”
One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.” Equality also did not come
when minister Hamid sent trade representatives to the Sri Lankan embassy in Washington, D.C.,
who knew no other language except Sinhala. We did not know who was stupid, the
minister or the ambassador?
There is a remarkable similarity between
the period of Southern Reconstruction after the American Civil War (1861-1865)
and what CAC brands as the Vernacular Disaster (1956-78). In the final
analysis, the American Civil war was a war against slavery. Abraham Lincoln
gave his life to save the Union. But after
half a million deaths, the terms of surrender were so generous and gentle
because that was what Lincoln
wished. Slaves became free and in the South for a brief period former slaves
enjoyed freedom and tasted little bit of political power. This was like what
happened in Ceylon
after 1956. But soon African Americans in the South succumbed to a reign of
white supremacy, separate but equal laws,” and the Ku Klux Klan. Blacks had to
wait until Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior led the civil rights movement in the
1960s. Legally and religiously backed racial discrimination was so rampant that
when the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on May 31, 1922, blacks were restricted to a
section across the road from the white audience. Twenty-one black guests left
the dedication in protest (Lies Across America, James W. Loewen, 1999, p. 334).
In Sri Lanka, those who came
to universities from remote villages had to think of buying at least a
postage-stamp size plot of land somewhere near Colombo
to send their children to Colombo
schools. Sri Lanka needs to discard the Colombo paradigm and go towards
Anuradhapura for a new capital city (The Island, April 21, 1998; Feb 7, 2001).
The victimization based on English began with an English language provision in
the JRJ constitution and now the department of education is issuing circulars
to commence English medium public schools.
A Large Dose of English Therapy
According to Dr. (Mrs.) Kariyawasam, during
minister Lokubandara’s time, English … was restored to its pride of place”
(The Island, May 4, 2000).
Among other things, with World Bank funds, a target was set to produce 1000
graduate teachers with English as a subject by the year 2000. Was this not an
example of CAC’s therapy dose? What has happened in 2001? Sri Lankan president
says over 40% of developmental funds in the state sector end in waste (Daily
News, Feb 14, 2001).
Despite talk about regional planning and the development of villages in remote
areas for the past 60 years, Colombo
is bursting with dust, filth, and corruption. The housing minister reports that
half of Colombo’s
population live in slum conditions. The problem is second only to San Salvador (Lacnet,
March 7). That is why talk must be matched by walk. Otherwise talk ends up with
Guinness Book records of youth suicide and international schools.
Macualay never played cricket, which most
Americans brand as a lazy persons’ game.” We were taught that it symbolizes
the British cabinet form of government. When the Royal-Thomian match was
reported in the Ceylon Daily News, in villages we played cricket with coconut
bats and Kaduru balls. Our Elle is America’s
most popular game, the baseball. But to talk … make English so widespread that
there is no status attached to it like cricket…” is misleading and cheating.
According to this theory English-speaking countries have no ruling (Colombo) class and no
injustice. If we take the predominance of African American in American sports,
then if CAC is right, African Americans must also be presidents, CEOs, and
senators by the dozen. In Sri
Lanka nobody laughs at you if you cannot
play cricket, but if you make a mistake in English, a language full of
exceptions and few rules, you are ridiculed and condemned. Here we come to the
question of denied access and opportunity, the class power of those who climbed
up the English language ladder kicking down the Sinhala and Tamil-speaking
majority. I often wonder why we do not consider learning English the same way
we try to learn how to ride a bicycle. When the time comes, we do not give up
it until we get the balance and able to take that first magic ride to freedom.
Colonialism and English
I think Ceylon was fortunate to come under
the British in 1798, instead of any other colonial master. When the Portuguese
finally abandoned Angola,
there were no native stationmasters to man the few railway stations it had! In
the streets of London,
English workingmen and women fought for a fair deal for the colonies. This was
why Gandhi said that except India
he would prefer to live in London.
When the stone heads of Lenin and Marx came tumbling down, starting with Lech
Walesa’s Polish shipyard strike, Karl Marx’s was peacefully sleeping in his
tomb in England without a single sentry to protect him. The old lion Prins
Gunasekara, who could not return to Sri Lanka because of death threats, live
safely in London in exile along with the JVP leader who is also in the same
boat. The story was that a certain viceroy of India was behind the formation of
the Indian National Congress.
Our admiration of the West and the English
language need not become an obsession.
Blind faith in everything western and American could become a mental
sickness. For example, why is that Colombo
people embrace things coming from America, which even the Americans
here are rejecting and protesting. A good example is the McDonald hamburgers
notorious as an unhealthy fast food (The McDonaldization of Society, George
Ritzer, 1993). It is widely believed for good reasons that the Buddhist India
and the Greece of Socrates and Plato had exchanges of ideas. In Buddhist
societies, both amongst layman and monks, one could find the existence of several
modern democratic principles. The Buddhist temple with its own chief incumbent
functions as one of the most decentralized and independent religious and civic
institution in the modern world, at least before the ministry of Buddhism and
its officers of the party in power started allocating government money to their
favorite temples. In America,
native American (e.g., Iroquois nations in the 1740s) ideas of liberty,
fraternity, and equality found their way to Europe
to influence social philosophers such as Thomas More, Locke, Montaigne,
Montesquieu, and Rousseau. These European thinkers in turn influenced American
such as Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison, the authors of the U.S. constitution (Lies My Teacher
Told Me, James W. Loewen, 1995, p. 111).
The value of such knowledge is that it
helps one to appreciate the lesson in a Buddhist Jataka story telling us not
take the raft on to our shoulders after we used it to cross the river. English
is only a raft and it need not be a Kaduwa. English is a very economical
language. Because it is so widespread proficiency in English is a passport to
see the world. It has a rich vocabulary, flexible and has relatively simple
spelling and pronunciation. If a standard western typewriter keyboard were to
expand to take in every Chinese ideograph it would have to be about 15 feet
long and 5 feet wide (The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, Bill
Bryson, 1990, p. 118). There is no reason to love English, and there is no
reason to hate it. Politicians and their henchmen-officers are playing the same
old game when they say that Sri Lanka is in a mess because English was ignored.
Barriers to English Proficiency
All what a Sri Lankan child needs is one
class period of quality English every school day from grades 2-10. As Dr.
Kariyawasam reported, of the 40,000 English teachers, nearly 19,000 recruited
in 1972, came with a credit pass in English at the G.C.E. (O.L.). Three decades
later are we doing a better job in solving this problem of quantity and quality
of English language teachers? How many schools even within a 25- mile radius
from Colombo could claim that they have enough qualified English teachers?
Those officers in the education department who plan English medium schools must
first complete the simple task of providing teachers who can teach English as a
second language. Teaching English as a foreign language is not the same as
speaking English. Sri Lanka
had a reasonably good textbook translation service in the 1960s and who killed
it? There is no one path to make
children proficient in English. But it can be done without killing their mother
tongue.
The education department has failed
miserably to develop an educational policy that helps the country. Instead, it
became a service department to politician ministers giving jobs to party
supporters. No wonder education has gone to the dogs. How can it develop
English medium schools when it could not solve the English language teachers’
shortage for the past twenty to thirty years? Is it planning to import teachers
from India
to teach the other subjects in English?
Those days there were night schools
attached to Temples
where English was taught free. Who killed that concept? Why cannot this method
be revived? This is a low cost, village level approach suitable for those
genuinely concerned with helping the masses. We commemorate with gratitude what
the American Olcott did for us in the 1880s. He helped to establish schools for
the Buddhists at a time the government was not willing to help. Ironically,
those who had the responsibility of continuing Olcott’s mission neglected
teaching English to Buddhist monks attending temple- pirivenas. It is much harder to learn Sanskrit, but student-priests
learned Sanskrit and Pali and not English. Buddhist priests had to rely on the
English knowledge of the lay Buddhist leaders. Same thing happened with the
Marxists. The leaders spoke English but the ordinary members, the laborers and
clerks did not know it
Providing a working knowledge of English to
those who study in their mother tongue should not be a matter of
Anto-Jata-Bahi-Jata. There is low cost, more effective, user-friendly,
community-based solutions people can do without getting under the iron heel of
the education department or party politics. For example, two years ago a
village temple at Walana, Panadura started an evening school to teach English
to children who cannot go to English tuition classes. The school (Sri Siddhartha
English School)
is open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4:00-6:30
p.m. and now has over 150 students. It is mainly for those who come
to the temple’s Sunday-school, but no one is excluded because of his/her
religion. The children are provided with basic learning materials and strict
discipline is maintained regarding attendance. The chief priest of the temple
is surprised and moved by the dedication of the retired and other voluntary
teachers who made this a success. They are also planning to start a night
school for the working adults. In this case everybody is a winner. Teachers do
something meritorious. Parents feel they are recognized. Children receive free
English tuition to supplement their regular school English class. This is
self-reliance and this is what we call access and opportunity. This is also an
example of the Global Paradox mentioned by John Naisbitt, – the bigger the
world economy, the more powerful its smallest players (1994). A small fraction of the World Bank money,
used by Colombo officers for big projects, if diverted to night schools,
evening and weekend schools, retired teachers and other dedicated citizens at
village-level are able to propagate English like cricket. I sincerely wish that
Mr. Chandraprema and professor Ruberu would take a leadership role in organizing
an evening or night English school in their hometowns. It will not be difficult
to find a thousand sponsors from the U.S.A. alone if they could find
thousand temples to offer free English classes.
C. Wijeyawickrema was an assistant
professor at Kent State University,
Ohio
