Taking language education forward
By N Sathiya Moorthy
Addressing a teacher-centric event at ‘Temple Trees’ the other day, President Ranil Wickremesinghe underscored the importance of English education and promised to ensure that teachers and necessary resources are provided for the purpose. In the same vein, he also highlighted that the opportunity should also be given to learn languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Arabic apart from English.
True, this is not the first time Ranil is saying this. Nor is he the first leader to say this while in office. As the presidential candidate, Mahinda Rajapaksa said this and more in his ‘Mahinda Chintanaya I & II’ but while in power he did little by way of promoting English education, leave aside his pre-poll commitment to promoting the ‘Three Language’ formula, meaning teaching and learning Sinhala, Tamil and English for all future citizens passing through the portals of the school education system.
It was not that the body was willing but the soul was not. Successive ministers in Mahinda’s time did try out various experiments to teach teachers to teach Tamil and English, for instance, but in vain. A delegation also visited India and the government’s specialised language-teaching institutions in that country more than once, only to return empty-handed.
They came back with the impression that India’s ‘Three-Language’ formula itself had not taken off as anticipated. If anything, the preference and priority for propagating Hindi was predominant in the politico-bureaucratic culture in New Delhi.
Tamil Nadu was/is the lone warrior, if any, and has been able to resist ‘Hindi imposition’ owing to social and cultural reasons getting political priority in the Dravidian scheme of things.
Taught-and-learnt process
In Sri Lanka, where too the Sinhala-Tamil language war is a part and parcel of the larger ethnic landscape, there is a need for all sides to understand the basics. Tamil as a language has fewer alphabets than Indo-Aryan languages, including Sinhala. Tamils pick up the exact pronunciation and intonation for reading and writing especially through usage, through a taught-and-learnt process, be it on mother’s lap, from a street-vendor or a formal school.
Because of this, non-Tamils have found a lot of differences in the use of spoken and written Tamil even otherwise, too. They have often said that the written and spoken Tamil are so different that they get confused. Ask the Tamils, they would tell you how four alphabets to represent four different stress-points – originating respectively in the human lips, mouth-roof, throat and abdomen –for the same sound is confusing. Both have their points, but then Tamil, in its purest form at origin possibly did not approve of new words and phrases that has made the common man’s language richer – a point that purists contest and disapprove of.
The real issue about teaching and learning a language that is not one’s mother-tongue in contemporary Sri Lanka, even if one wished, is that there are not bilingual or tri-lingual or multi-lingual teachers. The Mahinda regime’s three-language initiative suffered owing to this. The government did get experts from the Hyderabad institute in India to conduct workshops for local teachers in language proficiency and organisational structures.
The idea was for these teachers to take over the mission across the country. It is anybody’s guess how and why the scheme faltered. The communist ministers in charge of the scheme were very enthusiastic about the project and really believed that mutual learning and spreading of each other’s language will help develop mutual respect between Sinhala and Tamil-speaking ethnicities, if only over time.
Today, the nation is paying the price of the ‘Sinhala Only’ scheme, initiated by the most unlikely of ‘em all, slain Prime Minister S W R D Bandaranaike, an Oxfordian from Christ Church and called to bar at the Inner Temple. It is not only on the ethnic issue as is commonly understood. Over time, it’s more so on the job-front overseas, given that the nation cannot generate as many jobs as may be required.
Job-stealing by Chinese
The Rajapaksas deliberately or otherwise inserted an anomaly over the past decade and more as they invited huge Chinese investments. These investments came with Chinese employees and labour at all levels of project-execution, be it the Hambantota port or the multiple expressways that they built. In a way, Chinese were stealing Sri Lankan jobs, which were mostly with the Tamils of the nation, pre-Independence and were denied it because of ‘Sinhala Only’, because of their refusal to learn a language that the leaders who told them not to learn were fluent in, then and now.
With the Chinese investments, the ‘Sinhala Only’ politics came a full circle as the cause for the scheme was set at naught when Chinese took away Sri Lankan jobs though that might not have been part of China’s scheme, so to say. Unfortunately, no study seems to have been conducted for someone to come up with the number of jobs lost to the Chinese and the consequent loss of family incomes and also revenues for the government through the long period. Had it not been for the economic crisis, the process might have continued but for the continuing economic crisis, though in the case of Hambantota Port, it might still be operational.
In this background, the President declaring that structures and resources should be made available for helping the youth learn new and more languages is welcome in more ways than one. It is an indirect admission that ‘Sinhala Only’ has failed the nation. But Wickremesinghe may not have the guts required to admit it owing to politico-electoral compulsions. Though she did her best to resolve the ethnic issue, which flowed in a way from her father’s ‘Sinhala Only’, President Chandrika Kumaratunga-Bandaranaike too lacked the courage to admit the inherited folly. Less said about the rest in their place the better.
Colonial legacy?
But ask the ethnic Tamils who in the first-generation of ‘Sinhala Only’ and riotous attacks on Tamil protestors at capital Colombo’s Galle Face Green had taken flight to other nations, in the fifties, and they would tell you how it was not at all difficult for them to learn a new language, English, even when they were in their schools back home – but would not study another new language, Sinhala.
They capitalised on the post-colonial guilt of the British in particular, but making the ethnic issue, including the post-Independence ‘Sinhala Only’ (1956) as a colonial legacy that needed undoing in the post-colonial era, but in ways Whitehall was not seen as ruling over the Indian Ocean island-nation. Ask successive generations of Tamils who have tantalisingly converted their ‘economic asylum’ as ‘political asylum’ and made the other side believe it, too, and they have had no problem learning any language under the sun, as long as it got them citizenship in greener pastures.
It is no less so among the Sinhalas, though most of them might be skilled or semi-skilled village girls (in their prime), and took up jobs as nurses and house-maids all across the world, speaking the local language, maybe guttural, maybe better. The Sinhala men invariably took up jobs as mechanics and drivers in the Gulf-Arab region, Australia, Europe and the Americas.
Many other skilled men and women, Sinhalas, Tamils and Muslims, and also Upcountry Tamils in recent times, have practising doctors, lawyers and management executives overseas, with their own elected representatives in the local councils to provincial legislatures to national Parliaments, federal or not. None of them thought about ‘Sinhala Only’ getting them jobs nearer home.
All of it means only one thing. While putting the President’s vision on mission-mode, if at all this time, the government should dissect the prevalent model that is not government-driven, but mostly derives from individual initiatives of illiterate parents of semi-literate wards. But it is this scheme that has succeeded in this country, and these are the people who have been pumping in scarce foreign exchange which the economy and the individual can do with, more in these days of economic crisis.
It could train tri-lingual or even bilingual Muslim and Upcountry youth to be full-time or honorary teachers across the country. Over time, say at the end of five years, it can introduce Sinhala and Tamil examinations as a part of the annual scholarship exam at the appropriate level, and follow it up with another at O-Level examinations, including those marks also for university admissions, including those for professional courses.
Alongside, the government can free schools for O-Level and A-Level graduates and those above them, if possible in every district town, with help, assistance and resources from other nations and their missions in Colombo. It is not impossible if corporates in those countries desiring cheap and efficient labour may even consider starting tech-schools in the country with their future labour/employee requirements in mind.
Way back in 2005, in his presidential poll campaigns, PM Mahinda used to promise half a million more overseas jobs at the end of a five year term for him. After a couple of days, rival Ranil, now President, promised double that number of overseas jobs in the same time.
Maybe, they have both forgotten it. They might not have even done their homework at the time. But looking back, they are visionaries, who had foreseen the real possibility that jobs and forex have to come only from that source, apart from tourism, with its inherent limitations.
While entering the presidency, Gota too was a visionary. Post-
Covid, his government’s last budget promised massive funding for technical education, to train the nation’s youth in skilled and semi-skilled employment and employability. That is the road for the nation to take. The scheme should not be abandoned, just because Gota failed the nation otherwise.
(The writer is a policy analyst & political commentator, based in Chennai, India. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)
