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Sri Lanka The Modern Education System
Since independence in 1948, the government has made education
one of its highest priorities, a policy that has yielded
excellent results (see
table 4, Appendix). Within a period of
less than 40 years, the number of schools in Sri Lanka increased
by over 50 percent, the number of students increased more than
300 percent, and the number of teachers increased by more than
400 percent. Growth has been especially rapid in secondary
schools, which in 1985 taught 1.2 million students, or one-third
of the student population. Teachers made up the largest
government work force outside the plantation industry. The
literate population has grown correspondingly, and by the mid1980s over 90 percent of the population was officially literate
(87 percent for those above ten years of age), with near
universal literacy among the younger population. This is by far
the most impressive progress in South Asia and places Sri Lanka
close to the leaders in education among developing nations.
The government has taken an ever larger role in education.
Because private institutions no longer receive grants from the
government, they are forced to charge fees while competing with
free state-run schools. The percentage of students in the state
system has grown constantly, and by the 1980s 99 percent of
female students and 93 percent of male students at the primary
school level were being trained in government-run schools. The
government did not have a monopoly over education because
Buddhist pansala and pirivena, Muslim schools, and
Christian schools still thrived (the Roman Catholic Church alone
operated several hundred institutions from kindergarten to
secondary level, teaching over 80,000 children). The education
system of the state, however, had an overwhelming influence on
the majority of the population, especially the Sinhalese.
The state has tried to change the language of instruction in
its primary and secondary schools from English to Tamil or
Sinhala. By the 1960s, the vernacular languages were the primary
medium in all government secondary schools. In the 1980s, English
remained, however, an important key to advancement in technical
and professional careers, and there was still competition among
well-to-do families to place members in private English-language
programs in urban areas. Ethnic minorities long associated with
European-style education still formed a large percentage of the
English-speaking elite. In the 1980s, for example, almost 80
percent of the Burghers knew English, while among the Sinhalese
the English-speakers comprised only 12 percent.
Children from age five to ten attend primary school; from age
eleven to fifteen they attend junior secondary school
(terminating in Ordinary Level Examination); and from age sixteen
to seventeen they attend senior secondary school (terminating in
the Advanced Level Examination). Those who qualify can go on to
the university system, which is totally state-run. In the late
1980s, there were 8 universities and 1 university college with
over 18,000 students in 28 faculties, plus 2,000 graduate and
certificate students. The university system included the
University of Peradeniya, about six kilometers from Kandy, formed
between 1940 and 1960; the universities of Vidyalankara and
Vidyodaya, formed in the 1950s and 1960s from restructured
pirivena; the College of Advanced Technology in Katubedda,
Colombo District, formed in the 1960s; the Colombo campus of the
University of Ceylon, created in 1967; the University of Ruhunu
(1979); and Batticaloa University College (1981). There was also
the Buddhist and Pali University of Sri Lanka, established in
Colombo in 1982.
Among the major problems still facing the educational system
in the late 1980s were a serious dropout rate in the primary
grades and a continuing bias toward urban environments at the
expense of the countryside. The median level of educational
attainment in Sri Lanka was somewhere between grades 5 and 9, and
almost 40 percent of the students dropped out of school after 9
years. The reasons were not hard to discern in a primarily
agricultural society, where many young people were more urgently
needed in the fields or at home than in school once they had
achieved an operational level of literacy and arithmetic skills.
Many urban youth from low-income backgrounds also dropped out at
an early age. This pattern provided two-thirds of the students
with an education through grade 5 but less than 10 percent of the
population with a high school degree and less than 1 percent with
a college diploma. Despite government efforts in the 1980s to
expand opportunities for youth from rural areas and more sparsely
inhabited districts, the pressures for early dropout were more
pressing in precisely those areas where illiteracy was most
prevalent. In Colombo, for example, the overall literacy rate was
94 percent in 1988, while in Amparai District it was only 75
percent. Rural schools were more widely scattered, with poor
facilities and inadequate equipment, especially in the sciences.
Teachers preferred not to work in the countryside, and many rural
schools did not even go up to the level of twelfth grade.
The most dynamic field in education during the 1970s and
1980s was technical training. In the late 1980s, the Ministry of
Higher Education operated a network of twenty-seven technical
colleges and affiliated institutes throughout the country.
Courses led to national diplomas in accountancy, commerce,
technology, agriculture, business studies, economics, and
manufacture. Other government institutions, including the
Railway, Survey, and Irrigation Departments, ran their own
specialized training institutes. The Ministry of Labour had three
vocational and craft training institutes. The number of students
in all state-run technical institutes by the mid-1980s was
22,000. In addition, the government operated schools of
agriculture in four locations, as well as practical farm schools
in each district. A continuing problem in all fields of technical
education was extreme gender differentiation in job training;
women tended to enroll in home economics and teaching courses
rather than in scientific disciplines.
Data as of October 1988
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