25/12/2023
The existing system of school and State university education is outdated and has ceased to be inspiring or capable of firing the imagination of students, asserted Education Forum Sri Lanka Co-Founder and a former Secretary to the Ministry of Education Dr. Tara de Mel, in an interview with The Sunday Morning.
“The system doesn’t adequately prepare students for newer jobs of the emerging decades of the 21st century. Nor does the system prepare young people to meet the existing challenges of society and to face the multi-dimensional crises that Sri Lanka continues to face,” she added.
While hailing the 2024 Budget’s ‘healthier’ allocation of funds for a ‘knowledge-based economy,’ she noted however that such an allocation would not mean much unless it was actually used for the development of physical and human resource infrastructure and intellectual capital at speed, in order to catch up on the multiple types of education losses Sri Lanka continued to face.
Commenting on where Sri Lanka stands in terms of education and whether the future is bright or bleak, Dr. de Mel noted that realistically it would be difficult to predict a ‘bright’ future, given the yawning gaps in modernising curricula and pedagogy, deficiencies in high quality teacher education and professional development, the huge digital divide in terms of both devices and connectivity, poor management of schools, continuation of a highly-centralised approach of funding schools, lack of school-based teacher recruitment and transfers, and more.
Speaking on the crisis in education in Sri Lanka, Dr. de Mel said it could be “summed up as a crisis of quality, a crisis of access, crisis of equity, crisis of relevance and inclusion – augmented by a huge crisis in funding,” adding that without addressing all of these crises, she doubted whether economic revival and sustainability of such a recovery would be possible.
Source: https://www.themorning.lk/articles/tuZahMU7nqLuHbOvS2P2
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