Free Education  and the LSSP

January 5, 2012, 7:02 pm , The Island.


by Carlo Fonseka

Both Upendra Kodituwakku (The Island, 30th December 2011) and I benefitted greatly from the free education scheme introduced by Dr CWW Kannangara, and we are both grateful to him. According to the man who conceived the idea of free education in Sri Lanka –Mr A Ratnayake, Member for Dumbara – the free education scheme was intended to ensure that the poor boy was not deprived of education "in this age of the common man". Belonging as we did to the lower middle-class, strictly speaking neither UK nor I were "poor boys". The fee education scheme benefitted not so much "poor boys" as lower middle-class boys like us. That is probably why the majority of poor people saw no special reason to feel particularly grateful to Dr. CWWK for introducing the free education scheme.

Forgotten Man

To explain why I regard Dr. CWWK’s Central Schools and not his Free Education Scheme as the genuine pearl of great price, let me begin by reproducing below what I said in my Dr CWWK Memorial Lecture in 2009: "… In 1947 he suffered his one and only electoral defeat in his illustrious and eventful political career, which spanned nearly three decades. He died in 1969 in the fullness of years, but definitely not in the fullness of honors. KHM Sumathipala, the indefatigable, assiduous and admiring biographer of Kannangara, in his preface to his monumental work titled History of Education in Ceylon 1796 – 1965 published in 1968 when Kannangara was still alive, was painfully constrained to note: "Kannangara is at the moment a forgotten man". And so he remained for nearly 20 years after he was dead and gone. At last, in 1988, to its everlasting credit, the National Institute of Education determined that the great and good man Kannangara shall be honored at least posthumously by an Annual Memorial Lecture…". UK must explain why the public forgot the Father of Free Education so quickly and for so long.

Free Education

Let us now focus on how "free education" came to Sri Lanka as observed and recorded by Sir Ivor Jennings in his autobiography which was published in 2005. [Appropriate changes have been made in parenthesis by me in Sir Ivor’s narrative in order to facilitate easy reading]. "… At the 88th meeting we were ready… to sign the report… It was at this meeting that we were honored by the attendance of a colleague of whose existence we had all forgotten because he had been ill for a long time. He had not read the draft report… [but he asked whether] the report provided for free education. The Minister [CWWK] explained that it provided for free education up to 14 and 25 percent scholarship thereafter. Our colleague asked whether in this age of the common man we were prepared to deprive the poor boy of education by charging fees and thus making education a middle-class monopoly. The politicians with one accord answered that they were not, and they were right, for they thought they would lose their seats if it was known that free education had been proposed and they rejected it; though the event showed that most of them would lose their seats anyway. I [i.e. Sir Ivor] said that I had no objection to free education but in that case we must reconsider the whole report, and that would take us twelve months. Of course, I was overruled and the secretary was directed to bring up next time the amendments necessary to provide free education… The secretary’s amendments consisted of a new draft of the chapter on educational finance… The Committee had assumed a vast increase in educational expenditure. The waiver of fees in the English schools would not cost much. But these fees were being paid by the wealthier parents, and if all that was intended was to relieve the wealthy of school fees, the talk about free education for the "poor boy" was political humbug. The "poor boy" had free education already… The proposals had serious financial implications… a formidable bill… something like Rs. 300,000,000 in capital expenditure and an annual 250,000,000 for current expenditure… There was, however, a general election in the offing and so the Government agreed to "free education" and compulsory mother tongue forthwith, leaving the Department of Education to work out the consequences as best it could… [As it happened] the… educational system which was quite good in 1944, rapidly degenerated, and the Director of Education was imported from overseas to see if he could stage a revival. The more I think of it, the more pleased I am [i.e. Sir Ivor] that I did not sign the Special Committee’s Report.

Equality of Degradation

The English speaking classes were mostly fairly wealthy and their children spoke a sort of Sinhalese (or Tamil)… They could therefore be given a sort of education through a sort of Sinhalese (or Tamil) if the Government insisted, though they would have a much better education if they could be taught through English… This would of course have given them a great advantage at the secondary level and was therefore objected to by the politicians. A friend in England, not unsympathetic to the Labour Government once told me [i.e. Sir Ivor] of a similar tendency in England to produce what he called "equality of degradation". If the poor had to live in slums then everybody had to live in slums. Similarly in Ceylon, because the poor had an inferior education, everybody had to have an inferior education…" [Excerpts are from the autobiography of Sir William Ivor Jennings, The Road to Peradeniya, chapter IX titled The Educational Problem]

Final Assessment

So a sort of education which achieved an equality of degradation is what the free education scheme introduced by Dr. CWW Kannangara finally amounted to. Perhaps because Dr. CWWK was a so-called pragmatist (whatever that might be) and not a socialist, he was not prepared to undertake the redistribution of wealth in the country required to ensure a free education of high quality for all the children of this country. Way back in 1935 the LSSP presented a radical program to the country for social construction with a vision of high quality education for all. Hindsight shows that the revolutionary fervor of the LSSP leaders was out of sync with the semi-feudal outlook and conservative political impulses of the electorate universally enfranchised only in 1931. More realistically, the validity of Karl Marx’s theoretical insight that in the historical movement as a whole a phase of capitalism must precede socialism had not been fully grasped by the theoreticians of the LSSP. In such a situation Dr CWWK’s free education scheme could be presented as a pearl of great price. In practice, however, free education did not prove to be so in the experience of the vast majority of poor people in the country. It is true, though, that the likes of Upendra Kodituwakku and I as children of (lower) middle-class parents profited greatly from the free education scheme and valued it highly and gratefully. In due course, the majority of poor boys and girls in the country realized that free education was in fact a fake pearl. But in the context of the socio-economic development prevailing at that time, the 54 Central Schools he established constituted a genuine pearl of great price. In his own words, the aim of the Central School was "to collect together pupils who have passed the primary stage from all schools within a certain radius and provide education for them in a Central School staffed with the best teachers obtainable". Above all and crucially, the medium of instruction in the Central School was English. What is more, scholarships given to the brightest students in Central Schools entitled them to free board and lodging in school hostels. Thus an education through and in English was what a limited number of bright children in Central Schools received from the state. That was what ‘free education’ meant to the limited number of fortunate children. Such an education is really what all gifted children in our country deserve to get and therefore should get. In our society as presently constituted, gifted children of rich parents will get it from their parents. Gifted children of poor parents must be given it by the government. How to achieve this dual goal with minimum social envy and disruption is, I feel, the principal educational problem to be solved in our country in our time. One solution is to let the rich look after their children and for the government to look after the poor children at a level of educational excellence common to the rich and the poor.