Pavilions, grounds, and gyms: Reflections on the ‘postmodern elite’

By Uditha Devapriya

After lunch one Friday last February, a few weeks before the Royal-Thomian, Lakshman Gunasekara, the ever genial, nondescript editor and journalist, called me a member of the postmodern elite. The conversation had meandered to personal anecdotes after a heavy, enlightening discussion on history, politics, and economics. The invariable question, “What school did you attend?”, had cropped up. I had duly answered.

I’m not a product of a public school; I hail from a less intimidating background. Just what was “postmodern” about the rising tide of international schools, however, intrigued me. So I questioned him. He argued, convincingly, that such institutions have become symbolic of the new consumerist elite, or what Sanjana Hattotuwa in an article over a conversation with Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda calls “the new capitalism.” What was so postmodern about this elite? Simply the fact that they employ new, different methods of acquiring economic, social, cultural, even political capital, and that this difference is reflected in their lifestyle and behaviour; what they do, where they are, and where they go to. Including, of course, the schools and universities they study at.

Who are the new rich of Sri Lanka? The new rich are conspicuous in their choice of homes and vehicles. They are conspicuous in the way they flaunt those cosmetics: not only do they purchase the latest cars and min-ivans, they are adamant on flashing LED lights when the sun’s as clear as it can be and honking horns many times over when once would have sufficed. Such displays of wealth, however, are part of a mythical stereotype. They don’t reveal the real picture. The numbers don’t either. So what does?

Here I leave out the more dubious elements of the new rich, i.e. those who’ve made their way up through clandestine means. They too fit into the new rich, but I’m less interested in that luxury vehicle milieu than I am in their relationship with the old elite which once, as children long ago, attended elite institutions and chose elite occupations.

Much of this old elite have left those institutions and occupations; a new intermediate class has sprung up in their place. That intermediate class aspires to what the old elite once aspired to: they want their children to study at the same schools, choose the same subjects, and go up the same career ladder. They haven’t realised, though many of their children have, that these aspirations have become antiquated, and that a new elite have found out other ways of acquiring capital. It is this latter elite, really a middle class, I am supposedly a part of. Call it “postmodern” if you will.

The intermediate class, which aspires to the ranks of the old elite, is overwhelmingly rural or suburban. They tend to live in the same localities. Their economic capital is hardly adequate to join the postmodern elite. They can’t, for instance, enrol their children at an English medium international school; to do that they’d have to choke up LKR 100,000 every term, and their jobs – where they make anywhere between LKR 40,000 and LKR 80,000 a month – don’t afford them such an expensive luxury. I’ll come to this crowd later.

On the other hand, fee-levying institutions have become the preserve of a new postmodern middle class, plus an older elite whose family wealth and business interests continue to secure them a high place in society. The latter, of course, have also devised new ways of acquiring economic and social capital: they have kept up with the times.

Not all such institutions accommodate both groups, however, since international schools have trifurcated today: you have the expensive schools, the middleclass ones, and the low budget ones calling themselves “international” while merely offering the local syllabus in English. My school fell into the second category. At the time I began attending it the aspiring rich had already made their way in: children of wealthy bus owners, restaurateurs, and cloth merchants. More than half my A Level class had self-made businessmen as parents; the other half had corporate executives and professionals; I am told the situation is different in high-end international schools, which tend to be populated by children of diplomats, blue chip company CEOs, Harley Street type physicians, and the like.

However, though class compositions within these three types differ, they are still bound by the same goal: a Western oriented education aimed at a Western job market. They also tend to attract the same criticisms: they don’t enforce discipline properly, aren’t respectful of local traditions, and distance students from their cultural roots. I remember at least one editorial from an avowedly progressive and prominent English weekly which, at the time of a high-profile murder of a foreign student in Colombo, attributed the crime to “the conduct of international school yuppies.” That, of course, was an old order viscerally reacting against the new yuppies; nowhere in Sri Lanka, after all, is the gulf between these two generations more discernible than in the kind of schools they attended.

Within this new rich flaunting their wealth and sending their offspring to the most expensive institutions, there is a stratum that shares the aspirations of an older order. They are not members of a postmodern elite; they are members of an acquisitive middle class who want to stand shoulder to shoulder with the old elite.

A keen observer of Sri Lanka’s social landscape once told me that the elite schools are no longer housed by the children of their own distinguished old boys and girls; they are instead being filled up by the scions of new politicians, businessmen, and artists. The rest send their offspring to international schools. At least one or two established MPs from the Grand Old Party – the UNP, which historically has produced leaders from either of the two leading public schools in the country – I know have hailed from those leading public schools, yet send their offspring to expensive international schools, differentiating themselves from the new political class that opts for the public schools. Such violations of norms attract the most acute vitriol. Criticising the decision of a relative for choosing a yuppie enclave for his son, for instance, one Distinguished Old Boy told me that “they may be better at academics, but they lack proper facilities”, meaning pavilions, grounds, and gyms.

Measuring facilities in terms of pavilions, grounds, and gyms seems unfair, and yet to them it isn’t. The criteria they use are the same used in a much earlier era by a much older elite. The underlying presumption is that academics alone won’t do; especially at a boys’ school, sports must play a big role, even at the cost of academics. I remember Goolbai Gunasekara lamenting this obsession with sports over studies. She wasn’t alone in her concern, and yet the old attitude, antiquated though it is, continues to prevail within the old public schools. It may be at one level a retread of muscular Christian values, which permeated English public schools and found their way to the prototypes of those institutions here. Whatever it is, the old order, and the acquisitive new middle class vying to stand with the old order, pander to the same myths, norms, and values, the same notions of what makes out for good facilities and what doesn’t.

Regardless of the differences between the schools attended by this crowd and the new postmodern crowd, though, one thread binds them together. It’s not easy to spot out, because the non-fee and fee-levying status of these two institutions suggests an equitable distribution of student wealth in public schools and a more disparate crowd in international enclaves. However, once you consider that these two are dominated by the rich – a section of the old elite plus the new political and business class in public schools, another section of the old elite plus the postmodern middle class in international schools – you’ll realise that disparities exist between students in both, though in different forms.

In the old public schools, an old (antique?) elite who reside in Colombo and its immediate neighbourhoods coexist with a new middle class (predominantly the sons and daughters of new politicians and businessmen) and lower middle class (Sinhala speaking, rural, if not suburban). The Grade Five Scholarship population hails from this lower middle class; their families are hardly the peers of the more affluent crowd who sit in the same class as their children, yet they happen to be quite influential within their communities.

The occupations of most of these parents fit them neatly within a rural petty bourgeoisie: principals, police officers, retired army officers, and the like. Even when the status of their occupations seems more modest, a post like a security guard at a private bank, in the city, can still help them stand apart from their neighbourhood.

By dint of their children gaining admission to elite schools, moreover, their position in those neighbourhoods rise up more; part of the reason why such students get so much pressured in their A Levels – to choose a conventional subject stream, like Bioscience and Maths – into doing conventional careers – medicine and engineering – is that if they don’t get through those streams and careers, they’ll lose face. Typical, in that sense, was the argument between a scholarship boy, who had gained admission six years earlier to a popular school in Colombo, and his mother, who bemoaned his lack of interest in studies and said “even those who failed their Scholarship Exam in the village school, and stayed back, have entered local universities.”

The disparities between students in international enclaves don’t need to be sketched out, because they’re self-evident. Particularly in “budget schools” like the one I went to, the gap between upper and lower middle-class students could get discernible. There was always, for instance, a group called to the principal’s office for not paying fees on time. That was a more empathetic time, when late payments, if the principal so wished it, could be made without incurring any surcharge. It’s an indication of the dread with which such encounters were viewed by our families, however, that the mere mention of us being called to the office rang alarm bells. We were too young to realise the reality of income gaps between ourselves. But those gaps were there, just as they are there in the elite schools; thus the new middle class and the postmodern elite, as far as where they obtain their education is concerned, both encounter roughly the same disparities.

I’ve been talking about old elites and new elites without explaining why talking about them is important and what we should do once we’re done talking about them. The truth is that Sri Lanka’s education system has always been artificially grafted on the country. Since its inception in the 1830s, when two colonial officials drew up a series of recommendations for the country’s political and administrative machinery, this system has operated on a division between the better off and the less well off.

Such divisions came out even in the categorisation of schools: superior versus elementary, private versus aided, English versus Sinhala and Tamil. They continue today: of 10,175 government schools, for instance, only 1,044, or less than 11%, offer Science stream A Levels classes. The fiction of equality between students – sustained by the perception of education in Sri Lanka as “free” – tends to hide such deplorable inequalities.

As a member of the postmodern elite, I realise and admit the harmful effects which the new international schools have wrought on the system. Contrary to the prognostications of their most fervent champions, these institutions have made inroads to the education sector by filling the needs of a moneyed class, whose worldview and social ethic differ only in degree, and not in substance, from that of a seemingly “less cultured” acquisitive middle class and political class that send their children to the old elite public schools.

And yet, critical as I am of the damage done by these enclaves, I am also aware that the public education system contains its own share of disparities and moreover does a poor job of pretending otherwise. The truth is that under the guise of equality, a virtue public schools like bandying about, elite schools push down hard on disadvantaged students (though that’s grist for another article). Pavilions, grounds, and gyms, however “good”, are not going to change that. The postmodern elite have sinned, and continue to sin. So do the older elite, and the aspirants to the older elite. Even in the schools they attend.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com