Features
Sugathapala senarath Yapa: The one who went away
By Uditha Devapriya
Archive images courtesy of Gordon de Silva
In 2016 Torana Video Movies released Hanthane Kathawa. One of the last Sinhala films to depict university students in a romantic light, Hanthane Kathawa (1969) marked the debut of the man who became the Sinhala cinema’s most popular star, Vijaya Kumaratunga. It was also the last in a series of films which revolved around the theme of unrequited love, the others including Dahasak Sithuvili, Romeo Juliet Kathawak, Bakmaha Deege, and arguably the best of them all, Golu Hadawatha. Though classical in their conception, these works are important, in that they heralded both the end of an era in the Sinhalese cinema and marked the entry of those who would play a major role in the new cinema.
Probably no other film epitomised this shift than did Hanthane Kathawa. Kumaratunga would, of course, figure prominently in the new Sinhala cinema. Also making their debuts alongside him were the likes of Amarasiri Kalansooriya and Daya Tennakoon. Tennakoon and Dharmasena Pathiraja, then studying at the Peradeniya University, where the story is set, made a significant contribution to the mood and the tenor of the film. Though very few critics have noted this aspect to the film, Pathiraja’s repertoire of actors – who he would use again and again – included those who made their entry in Hanthane Kathawa. In that regard, the latter marked an interregnum between two historical eras.
On its own, Hanthane Kathawa stands out rather well. The acting is convincing – perhaps because many of the cast members were real-life university students – and the music, by Premasiri Khemadasa, who for the first and last time in his career worked with Mahagama Sekara, figures in among the best he composed for any film. It marked the last time Tony Ranasinghe played the role of a sympathetic everyman: practically every role he got in the 1970s were as hardened, cynical protagonists or antagonists. It also signalled the return of Swarna Mallawarachchi, who would soon leave Sri Lanka. As for the story, it is captivating, if not simple, revolving around a theme one can identify with at once. For me, it is one of the few Sinhala films that remain as fresh today as it was at the time of its release.
More than anything, the film reveals the eclecticism of its director. There are references to other films and works of art which one can easily miss. Its theme – a contest between two completely different teenagers over a woman – borrows from two somewhat interrelated stories: the bandit’s version of events in Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and the last few sequences in Sarachchandra’s Maname. To this one can add another reference: Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water. Neither Rashomon nor Knife in the Water was playing at mainstream halls in Sri Lanka at the time; these were art-house works, screened at places like the British Council and the American Center. That the director had absorbed these influences obviously tells us that he was an avid cinephile eager to come up with a different work of art.
And yet, very little has been written about the director, Sugathapala Senarath Yapa. This may be because Yapa never directed a feature film again. He had his reasons for not doing so. The critical fraternity, long wooed over by what directors like Lester James Peries were doing in the Sinhala cinema, were beginning to turn and rebel against them. Like the Cahiers du Cinema critics in France, they were not disposed towards directors they associated with classical films: what they called “le cinéma de papa”, or “daddy’s cinema.” At the screening of Dharmasena Pathiraja’s Ahas Gawwa, a group of critics distributed pamphlets directed at, and against, Peries: following their French counterparts, they termed the latter’s conception of the cinema “Apochchige Cinemawa.” Yapa became one of their targets.
Sugathapala Senarath Yapa was born in Akuressa in 1935. Both his parents died when he was young. He would be brought up by his grandmother, a “generous woman” as he remembered her for me. His childhood, he recalled, had been rather boisterous, amounting to a series of misadventures which frequently landed him in trouble. These misadventures reached their peak when together with a friend of his called Abeywickrama, Yapa spread a rumour around his first school, Rakvana Maha Vidyalaya, that the buns served to children during the interval contained worms. The outcry this provoked and the discovery of the two culprits who had spread the rumour led to Senarath Yapa being expelled. Out of one school, he managed to get into another, Pelmadulla Central College some miles away.
Pelmadulla Central had been headed by a stern but well-meaning principal, A. V. Gunapala. A member of the Hela Havula, Gunapala had just one message for young Yapa: stick to your studies, don’t indulge in antics. Heeding Gunapala’s message, Yapa managed to get through his SSC Preparatory Exams. However, the school he had applied for to do his SSC Exams, St Anthony’s College, rejected him. The Rector at St Anthony’s, “one Father Moses”, told him to wait for another year. “I didn’t want to wait that long. I would have wasted time getting into all kinds of mischief and into fights with boys my age.” Having abandoned his hopes for a career in the civil service, Yapa ultimately decided to let go of his studies.
At the time cinema halls were limited to the cities. Villages like Akuressa and Rakvana, on the other hand, had to do with “moving theatres”, which were essentially makeshift camps. These would screen the popular attractions of the day: Bollywood romances and Hollywood thrillers. Yapa made his way to these theatres: “I got to watch the entire Zorro series there.” His first job was as a movie title painter for one of the many touring theatres. Having seen his work, the owner of the hall, the MP Reggie Perera, asked him to pay visit. When he met Yapa, Perera offered him a better job: “as a kind of advertiser for the company.” This would be followed by another more lucrative job: as a counter clerk at a touring cinema owned by a distant cousin, “the comedian L. M. Perera.” It was while at this job that Senarath Yapa did his clerical exams, passed them, and began work at the Labour Department.
Offering a more stable and lucrative career, the Labour Department encouraged Yapa to get more fully and actively involved in the arts, starting off with a series of radio drama that included a translation of Tagore’s Gitanjali. His stint at the radio service a few years later got him to meet Mahagama Sekara. The radio service also helped Yapa land a role in a newly established drama troupe. Headed by G. D. L. Perera, the troupe was called Kala Pela. The role was not in a play as Yapa had expected, but in a film: Perera’s debut, the searing and beautifully poignant Sama, which also marked the debuts of Denawaka Hamine and Leonie Kothalawala. Sama would win a number of awards, locally and internationally.
Senarath Yapa wound up as the Secretary and Treasurer of Kala Pela. Later he left the group, determined to carve his own path. In his first few years at the Labour Department, he had made it a habit to visit the British Council, to watch films and read books about the cinema, to brush up his knowledge of Western culture. “I wanted to get away from what I had been watching and savouring at the touring theatres.” He could not have picked on a better time and era to transition from the one to the other: the 1950s, when he was at the prime of his youth, was when exciting new strides were being made in the Japanese, Indian, and even Sri Lankan cinema, with Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa taking the lead.
Recalling the films he saw and the books he read, Yapa had this to tell me”
“What I understood about the cinema, from what I watched and came across back then, was that art is not always about action. A good film is built not just on what characters say and do, but what they hide from other characters. Two films that inspired me in this regard were Vittoria de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Bicycle Thieves is about a father who can’t bear to tell his son that he is trying to steal a bicycle for him. Rashomon is about a group of people who have got involved with a murder, who can’t come out and tell us what really happened. Not even the dead Samurai can speak the truth.”
Interview with Sugathapala Senarath Yapa, December 21, 2015
Good art, in other words, revealed as much as it concealed, and in the movies and plays he saw, the characters, even the heroes, hid their intentions from one another. This aspect surfaced more sharply in the 1960s, with the arrival of a new generation of directors in the West, particularly in Europe. Two films in particular epitomised this trend: Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water. Having seen Knife in the Water, Sugathapala Senarath Yapa finally decided to make his own film. In it he combined three stories: not just Polanski’s and Kurosawa’s films, but also Sarachchandra’s Maname.
Because the story revolved around a woman whose intentions and desires are never clear, Yapa asked the lead actress, Swarna Mallawarachchi, “to watch My Fair Lady and model herself on Audrey Hepburn’s performance.” There is a point in the story, in fact, where the male characters jokily taunt Mallawarchchi for being a “fair lady.” What this showed clearly was a director who wanted everything to be pitch-perfect, a director who wanted his work to reflect his own love for the cinema. In this Yapa differed very little from Lester James and Sumitra Peries, except probably in the circumstances from which he hailed: unlike the latter, he came from an altogether less affluent and privileged background.
Perhaps, it was these circumstances that, tragically, prevented him from moving into what could have been a promising career. “I was soon among the directors attacked by critics who felt their conception of the cinema was the only one that mattered.” While the two Perieses could bear the brunt of these attacks, Yapa found himself increasingly side-lined and ostracised, to a point where he had to limit himself to the Government Film Unit. At the GFU, he revealed his talents once again: his debt documentary (really a docudrama), Minisa saha Kaputa, won the Silver Peacock at the New Delhi Film Festival. Like Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin, however, Senarath Yapa was pushed to making lesser works: his next two films, Pembara Madu and the much better Induta Mal Mitak, are deeply commercialist in their outlook. At the GFU, meanwhile, he directed 28 documentaries.
Despite his less than memorable encounter with radical left-wing film critics and directors, Yapa holds those who demand a greater and superior conception of the cinema in high regard. “Today, films have become an extension of fantasies, of dreams,” he told me, as we wrapped up our interview. This may seem like an unfair judgement – aren’t all films, at the end of the day, extensions of dreams? – yet viewed from a certain angle, there is really no denying that the commercial cinema, while sustaining the industry, has fallen far short of the production and aesthetic values which epitomise it in countries like India. I sense some bitterness in Yapa’s recollections of the past, but this is only to be expected: no one who has seen Hanthane Kathawa can fail to be entranced by its romantic sweep. This is a movie that should have heralded a brilliant career. That it did not is utterly saddening.
The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com
In a village in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, a woman receives a small but steady sum each month – not wages, for she has no formal job, but an unconditional cash transfer from the government.
Premila Bhalavi says the money covers medicines, vegetables and her son’s school fees. The sum, 1,500 rupees ($16: £12), may be small, but its effect – predictable income, a sense of control and a taste of independence – is anything but.
Her story is increasingly common. Across India, 118 million adult women in 12 states now receive unconditional cash transfers from their governments, making India the site of one of the world’s largest and least-studied social-policy experiments.
Long accustomed to subsidising grain, fuel and rural jobs, India has stumbled into something more radical: paying adult women simply because they keep households running, bear the burden of unpaid care and form an electorate too large to ignore.
Eligibility filters vary – age thresholds, income caps and exclusions for families with government employees, taxpayers or owners of cars or large plots of land.
“The unconditional cash transfers signal a significant expansion of Indian states’ welfare regimes in favour of women,” Prabha Kotiswaran, a professor of law and social justice at King’s College London, told the BBC.
The transfers range from 1,000-2,500 rupees ($12-$30) a month – meagre sums, worth roughly 5-12% of household income, but regular. With 300 million women now holding bank accounts, transfers have become administratively simple.
Women typically spend the money on household and family needs – children’s education, groceries, cooking gas, medical and emergency expenses, retiring small debts and occasional personal items like gold or small comforts.
What sets India apart from Mexico, Brazil or Indonesia – countries with large conditional cash-transfer schemes – is the absence of conditions: the money arrives whether or not a child attends school or a household falls below the poverty line.
Goa was the first state to launch an unconditional cash transfer scheme to women in 2013. The phenomenon picked up just before the pandemic in 2020, when north-eastern Assam rolled out a scheme for vulnerable women. Since then these transfers have turned into a political juggernaut.
The recent wave of unconditional cash transfers targets adult women, with some states acknowledging their unpaid domestic and care work. Tamil Nadu frames its payments as a “rights grant” while West Bengal’s scheme similarly recognises women’s unpaid contributions.
In other states, the recognition is implicit: policymakers expect women to use the transfers for household and family welfare, say experts.
This focus on women’s economic role has also shaped politics: in 2021, Tamil actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan promised “salaries for housewives”. (His fledgling party lost.) By 2024, pledges of women-focused cash transfers helped deliver victories to political parties in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Odisha, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh.
In the recent elections in Bihar, the political power of cash transfers was on stark display. In the weeks before polling in the country’s poorest state, the government transferred 10,000 rupees ($112; £85) to 7.5 million female bank accounts under a livelihood-generation scheme. Women voted in larger numbers than men, decisively shaping the outcome.
Critics called it blatant vote-buying, but the result was clear: women helped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition secure a landslide victory. Many believe this cash infusion was a reminder of how financial support can be used as political leverage.
Yet Bihar is only one piece of a much larger picture. Across India, unconditional cash transfers are reaching tens of millions of women on a regular basis.
Maharashtra alone promises benefits for 25 million women; Odisha’s scheme reaches 71% of its female voters.
In some policy circles, the schemes are derided as vote-buying freebies. They also put pressure on state finances: 12 states are set to spend around $18bn on such payouts this fiscal year. A report by think-tank PRS Legislative Research notes that half of these states face revenue deficits – this happens when a state borrows to pay regular expenses without creating assets.
But many argue they also reflect a slow recognition of something India’s feminists have argued for decades: the economic value of unpaid domestic and care work.
Women in India spent nearly five hours a day on such work in 2024 – more than three times the time spent by men, according to the latest Time Use Survey. This lopsided burden helps explain India’s stubbornly low female labour-force participation. The cash transfers, at least, acknowledge the imbalance, experts say.
Do they work?
Evidence is still thin but instructive. A 2025 study in Maharashtra found that 30% of eligible women did not register – sometimes because of documentation problems, sometimes out of a sense of self-sufficiency. But among those who did, nearly all controlled their own bank accounts.
A 2023 survey in West Bengal found that 90% operated their accounts themselves and 86% decided how to spend the money. Most used it for food, education and medical costs; hardly transformative, but the regularity offered security and a sense of agency.
More detailed work by Prof Kotiswaran and colleagues shows mixed outcomes.
In Assam, most women spent the money on essentials; many appreciated the dignity it afforded, but few linked it to recognition of unpaid work, and most would still prefer paid jobs.
In Tamil Nadu, women getting the money spoke of peace of mind, reduced marital conflict and newfound confidence – a rare social dividend. In Karnataka, beneficiaries reported eating better, gaining more say in household decisions and wanting higher payments.
Yet only a sliver understood the scheme as compensation for unpaid care work; messaging had not travelled. Even so, women said the money allowed them to question politicians and manage emergencies. Across studies, the majority of women had full control of the cash.
“The evidence shows that the cash transfers are tremendously useful for women to meet their own immediate needs and those of their households. They also restore dignity to women who are otherwise financially dependent on their husbands for every minor expense,” Prof Kotiswaran says.
Importantly, none of the surveys finds evidence that the money discourages women from seeking paid work or entrench gender roles – the two big feminist fears, according to a report by Prof Kotiswaran along with Gale Andrew and Madhusree Jana.
Nor have they reduced women’s unpaid workload, the researchers find. They do, however, strengthen financial autonomy and modestly strengthen bargaining power. They are neither panacea nor poison: they are useful but limited tools, operating in a patriarchal society where cash alone cannot undo structural inequities.
What next?
The emerging research offers clear hints.
Eligibility rules should be simplified, especially for women doing heavy unpaid care work. Transfers should remain unconditional and independent of marital status.
But messaging should emphasise women’s rights and the value of unpaid work, and financial-literacy efforts must deepen, researchers say. And cash transfers cannot substitute for employment opportunities; many women say what they really want is work that pays and respect that endures.
“If the transfers are coupled with messaging on the recognition of women’s unpaid work, they could potentially disrupt the gendered division of labour when paid employment opportunities become available,” says Prof Kotiswaran.
India’s quiet cash transfers revolution is still in its early chapters. But it already shows that small, regular sums – paid directly to women – can shift power in subtle, significant ways.
Whether this becomes a path to empowerment or merely a new form of political patronage will depend on what India chooses to build around the money.
[BBC]
Some opposition political parties have striven hard to turn the disaster of Cyclone Ditwah to their advantage. A calamity of such unanticipated proportions ought to have enabled all political parties to come together to deal with this tragedy. Failure to do so would indicate both political and moral bankruptcy. The main issue they have forcefully brought up is the government’s failure to take early action on the Meteorological Department’s warnings. The Opposition even convened a meeting of their own with former President Ranil Wickremesinghe and other senior politicians who shared their experience of dealing with natural and man-made disasters of the past, and the present government’s failures to match them.
The difficulty to anticipate the havoc caused by the cyclone was compounded by the neglect of the disaster management system, which includes previous governments that failed to utilise the allocated funds in an open, transparent and corruption free manner. Land designated as “Red Zones” by the National Building Research Organisation (NBRO), a government research and development institute, were built upon by people and ignored by successive governments, civil society and the media alike. NBRO was established in 1984. According to NBRO records, the decision to launch a formal “Landslide Hazard Zonation Mapping Project (LHMP)” dates from 1986. The institutional process of identifying landslide-prone slopes, classifying zones (including what we today call “Red Zones”), and producing hazard maps, started roughly 35 to 40 years ago.
Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines which were lashed by cyclones at around the same time as Sri Lanka experienced Cyclone Ditwah were also unprepared and also suffered enormously. The devastation caused by cyclones in the larger southeast Asian region is due to global climate change. During Cyclone Ditwah some parts of the central highlands received more than 500 mm of rainfall. Official climatological data cite the average annual rainfall for Sri Lanka as roughly 1850 mm though this varies widely by region: from around 900 mm in the dry zones up to 5,000 mm in wet zones. The torrential rains triggered by Ditwah were so heavy that for some communities they represented a rainfall surge comparable to a major part of their typical annual rainfall.
Inclusive Approach
Climate change now joins the pantheon of Sri Lanka’s challenges that are beyond the ability of a single political party or government to resolve. It is like the economic bankruptcy, ethnic conflict and corruption in governance that requires an inclusive approach in which the Opposition, civil society, religious society and the business community need to join rather than merely criticise the government. It will be in their self-interest to do so. A younger generation (Gen Z), with more energy and familiarity with digital technologies filled, the gaps that the government was unable to fill and, in a sense, made both the Opposition and traditional civil society redundant.
Within hours of news coming in that floods and landslides were causing havoc to hundreds of thousands of people, a people’s movement for relief measures was underway. There was no one organiser or leader. There were hundreds who catalysed volunteers to mobilise to collect resources and to cook meals for the victims in community kitchens they set up. These community kitchens sprang up in schools, temples, mosques, garages and even roadside stalls. Volunteers used social media to crowdsource supplies, match donors with delivery vehicles, and coordinate routes that had become impassable due to fallen trees or mudslides. It was a level of commitment and coordination rarely achieved by formal institutions.
The spontaneous outpouring of support was not only a youth phenomenon. The larger population, too, contributed to the relief effort. The Galle District Secretariat sent 23 tons of rice to the cyclone affected areas from donations brought by the people. The Matara District Secretariat made arrangements to send teams of volunteers to the worst affected areas. Just as in the Aragalaya protest movement of 2022, those who joined the relief effort were from all ethnic and religious communities. They gave their assistance to anyone in need, regardless of community. This showed that in times of crisis, Sri Lankans treat others without discrimination as human beings, not as members of specific communities.
Turning Point
The challenge to the government will be to ensure that the unity among the people that the cyclone disaster has brought will outlive the immediate relief phase and continue into the longer term task of national reconstruction. There will be a need to rethink the course of economic development to ensure human security. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has spoken about the need to resettle all people who live above 5000 feet and to reforest those areas. This will require finding land for resettlement elsewhere. The resettlement of people in the hill country will require that the government address the issue of land rights for the Malaiyaha Tamils.
Since independence the Malaiyaha Tamils have been collectively denied ownership to land due first to citizenship issues and now due to poverty and unwillingness of plantation managements to deal with these issues in a just and humanitarian manner beneficial to the workers. Their resettlement raises complex social, economic and political questions. It demands careful planning to avoid repeating past mistakes where displaced communities were moved to areas lacking water, infrastructure or livelihoods. It also requires political consensus, as land is one of the most contentious issues in Sri Lanka, tied closely to identity, ethnicity and historical grievances. Any sustainable solution must go beyond temporary relocation and confront the historical exclusion of the Malaiyaha Tamil community, whose labour sustains the plantation economy but who remain among the poorest groups in the country.
Cyclone Ditwah has thus become a turning point. It has highlighted the need to strengthen governance and disaster preparedness, but it has also revealed a different possibility for Sri Lanka, one in which the people lead with humanity and aspire for the wellbeing of all, and the political leadership emulates their example. The people have shown through their collective response to Cyclone Ditwah that unity and compassion remain strong, which a sincere, moral and hardworking government can tap into. The challenge to the government will be to ensure that the unity among the people that the cyclone disaster has brought will outlive the immediate relief phase and continue into the longer term task of national reconstruction with political reconciliation.
by Jehan Perera
In the short span of two or three days, Cyclone Ditwah, has caused a disaster of unprecedented proportions in our midst. Lashing away at almost the entirety of the country, it has broken through the ramparts of centuries old structures and eroded into areas, once considered safe and secure.
The rains may have passed us by. The waters will recede, shops will reopen, water will be in our taps, and we can resume the daily grind of life. But it will not be the same anymore; it should not be. It should not be business as usual for any of us, nor for the government. Within the past few years, Sri Lankan communities have found themselves in the middle of a crisis after crisis, both natural and man-made, but always made acute by the myopic policies of successive governments, and fuelled by the deeply hierarchical, gendered and ethnicised divides that exist within our societies. The need of the hour for the government today is to reassess its policies and rethink the directions the country, as a whole, has been pushed into.
Neoliberal disaster
In the aftermath of the devastation caused by the natural disaster, fundamental questions have been raised about our existence. Our disaster is, in whole or in part, the result of a badly and cruelly managed environment of the planet. Questions have been raised about the nature of our economy. We need to rethink the way land is used. Livelihoods may have to be built anew, promoting people’s welfare, and by deveoloping a policy on climate change. Mega construction projects is a major culprit as commentators have noted. Landslides in the upcountry are not merely a result of Ditwah lashing at our shores and hills, but are far more structural and points to centuries of mismanagement of land. (https://island.lk/weather-disasters-sri-lanka-flooded-by-policy-blunders-weak-enforcement-and-environmental-crime-climate-expert/). It is also about the way people have been shunted into lands, voluntarily or involuntarily, that are precarious, in their pursuit of a viable livelihood, within the limited opportunities available to them.
Neo liberal policies that demand unfettered land appropriation and built on the premise of economic growth at any expense, leading to growing rural-urban divides, need to be scrutinised for their short and long term consequences. And it is not that any of these economic drives have brought any measure of relief and rejuvenation of the economy. We have been under the tyrannical hold of the IMF, camouflaged as aid and recovery, but sinking us deeper into the debt trap. In October 2025, Ahilan Kadirgamar writes, that the IMF programme by the end of 2027, “will set up Sri Lanka for the next crisis.” He also lambasts the Central Bank and the government’s fiscal policy for their punishing interest rates in the context of disinflation and rising poverty levels. We have had to devalue the rupee last month, and continue to rely on the workforce of domestic workers in West Asia as the major source of foreign exchange. The government’s negotiations with the IMF have focused largely on relief and infrastructure rebuilding, despite calls from civil society, demanding debt justice.
The government has unabashedly repledged its support for the big business class. The cruelest cut of them all is the appointment of a set of high level corporate personalities to the post-disaster recovery committee, with the grand name, “Rebuilding Sri Lanka.” The message is loud and clear, and is clearly a slap in the face of the working people of the country, whose needs run counter to the excessive greed of extractive corporate freeloaders. Economic growth has to be understood in terms that are radically different from what we have been forced to think of it as, till now. For instance, instead of investment for high profits, and the business of buy and sell in the market, rechannel investment and labour into overall welfare. Even catch phrases like sustainable development have missed their mark. We need to think of the economy more holistically and see it as the sustainability of life, livelihood and the wellbeing of the planet.
The disaster has brought on an urgency for rethinking our policies. One of the areas where this is critical is education. There are two fundamental challenges facing education: Budget allocation and priorities. In an address at a gathering of the Chamber of Commerce, on 02 December, speaking on rebuilding efforts, the Prime Minister and Minister of Education Dr. Harini Amarasuriya restated her commitment to the budget that has been passed, a budget that has a meagre 2.4% of the GDP allocated for education. This allocation for education comes in a year that educational reforms are being rolled out, when heavy expenses will likely be incurred. In the aftermath of the disaster, this has become more urgent than ever.
Reforms in Education
The Government has announced a set of amendments to educational policy and implementation, with little warning and almost no consultation with the public, found in the document, Transforming General Education in Sri Lanka 2025 published by the Ministry of Education. Though hailed as transformative by the Prime Minister (https://www.news.lk/current-affairs/in-the-prevailing-situation-it-is-necessary-to-act-strategically-while-creating-the-proper-investments-ensuring-that-actions-are-discharged-on-proper-policies-pm), the policy is no more than a regurgitation of what is already there, made worse. There are a few welcome moves, like the importance placed on vocational training. Here, I want to raise three points relating to vital areas of the curriculum that are of concern: 1) streamlining at an early age; relatedly 2) prioritising and privileging what is seen as STEM education; and 3) introducing a credit-based modular education.
1. A study of the policy document will demonstrate very clearly that streamlining begins with Junior Secondary Education via a career interest test, that encourages students to pursue a particular stream in higher studies. Further Learning Modules at both “Junior Secondary Education” and “Senior Secondary Education Phase I,” entrench this tendency. Psychometric testing, that furthers this goal, as already written about in our column (https://kuppicollective.lk/psychometrics-and-the-curriculum-for-general-education/) points to the bizarre.
2. The kernel of the curriculum of the qualifying examination of Senior Secondary Education Phase I, has five mandatory subjects, including First Language, Math, and Science. There is no mandatory social science or humanities related subject. One can choose two subjects from a set of electives that has history and geography as separate subjects, but a Humanities/Social Science subject is not in the list of mandatory subjects. .
3. A credit-based, modular education: Even in universities, at the level of an advanced study of a discipline, many of us are struggling with module-based education. The credit system promotes a fragmented learning process, where, depth is sacrificed for quick learning, evaluated numerically, in credit values.
Units of learning, assessed, piece meal, are emphasised over fundamentals and the detailing of fundamentals. Introducing a module based curriculum in secondary education can have an adverse impact on developing the capacity of a student to learn a subject in a sustained manner at deeper levels.
Education wise, and pedagogically, we need to be concerned about rigidly compartmentalising science oriented, including technological subjects, separately from Humanities and Social Studies. This cleavage is what has led to the idea of calling science related subjects, STEM, automatically devaluing humanities and social sciences. Ironically, universities, today, have attempted, in some instances, to mix both streams in their curriculums, but with little success; for the overall paradigm of education has been less about educational goals and pedagogical imperatives, than about technocratic priorities, namely, compartmentalisation, fragmentation, and piecemeal consumerism. A holistic response to development needs to rethink such priorities, categorisations and specialisations. A social and sociological approach has to be built into all our educational and development programmes.
National Disasters and Rebuilding Community
In the aftermath of the disaster, the role of education has to be rethought radically. We need a curriculum that is not trapped in the dichotomy of STEM and Humanities, and be overly streamlined and fragmented. The introduction of climate change as a discipline, or attention to environmental destruction cannot be a STEM subject, a Social Science/Humanities subject or even a blend of the two. It is about the vision of an economic-cum-educational policy that sees the environment and the economy as a function of the welfare of the people. Educational reforms must be built on those fundamentals and not on real or imagined short term goals, promoted at the economic end by neo liberal policies and the profiteering capitalist class.
As I write this, the sky brightens with its first streaks of light, after days of incessant rain and gloom, bringing hope into our hearts, and some cheer into the hearts of those hundreds of thousands of massively affected people, anxiously waiting for a change in the weather every second of their lives. The sense of hope that allows us to forge ahead is collective and social. The response by Lankan communities, to the disaster, has been tremendously heartwarming, infusing hope into what still is a situation without hope for many. This spirit of collective endeavour holds the promise for what should be the foundation for recovery. People’s demands and needs should shape the re-envisioning of policy, particularly in the vital areas of education and economy.
(Sivamohan Sumathy was formerly attached to the Department of English, University of Peradeniya)
Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.
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Sunday Island – 28th March
Sunday Island Headlines – 21 March
Sunday Island – 21st February – Headlines
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News6 days ago
Lunuwila tragedy not caused by those videoing Bell 212: SLAF
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News1 day agoOver 35,000 drug offenders nabbed in 36 days
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News5 days agoLevel III landslide early warning continue to be in force in the districts of Kandy, Kegalle, Kurunegala and Matale
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Business3 days agoLOLC Finance Factoring powers business growth
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News3 days agoCPC delegation meets JVP for talks on disaster response
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News3 days agoA 6th Year Accolade: The Eternal Opulence of My Fair Lady
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News1 day agoRising water level in Malwathu Oya triggers alert in Thanthirimale
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Midweek Review6 days agoHouse erupts over Met Chief’s 12 Nov unheeded warning about cyclone Ditwah