Features

Kuppi Talk:

Published

5 years ago

2021/03/2

Sahan Weerasooriya

setting the terms of the debate on education

by Sivamohan Sumathy

“Free Education is not something in the sky. I can touch it, I can feel it.”

A student in a basic writing skills class writes the line above, to my infinite amazement. I have never come across a sentiment related to free education so simply, so evocatively and so theoretically expressed. As battles rage across newspapers and the social media, among politicians and policy planners, and among educationists and administrators, I hold onto this expressive pronouncement of this student, who struggled to articulate her sentiment about free education in a language she was just beginning to feel is her own. She captures all that is meaningful in our universities; access, coming into knowledge, and coming into a knowing of the world around us, known among other things, as social mobility and as an awareness of one’s place in the country, society and the world.

Education has been one of the cornerstones of what citizenship means in material terms. Access to institutions of power, locally and nationally, and access to community, culture, media and other institutions of authority and position, have been mediated by the great mobilities afforded by education. Education is what has made each of us become conscious of ourselves, individually and as a society, even in a fractured sense (divided by multiple social factors) of a certain responsibility that we have toward ourselves. At the broadest, this responsibility urges us to comprehend and articulate the role of the citizen in education. It empowers and behoves us to act as conscious agents of change who will become a part of a critical mass of intellectual activity, initiating and complementing political activity at multiple fronts. I will call this a movement toward democracy that we have to cherish in education.

Crisis of Education and Crisis in Education: Corporate skills and privatisation of state institutions

This dynamic social process is under stress and the empowering agencies of education are under siege. There is a two-fold challenge facing education today. There is a crisis of education and a crisis in education and they are related. The crisis of education is that of losing sight of its democratic potential, the twin task of empowering the socially marginalized and rearticulating a view of the world within a mobilisation for greater democratisation. It is about the content of our education and its objectives. Whom do we serve as educators? The people, understood as those who are emerging as actors but not yet there as the powerful, or those already in authority and in positions of power, in other words, the corporate sector? The crisis in education is the disempowerment of education itself, its institutions, its subjects, teachers and students, and the erosion of its principles by forces that are quite external to it, market forces.

Let me first look at how market forces are privileged and how such a privileging act is detrimental to us. In the current context, globalization is another name for the rapid development of capitalist financialization, and a dissolution of labour as a collective force and as a movement toward socialized citizenry. Today’s market driven policies view education as a commodity, a package of skills and competencies that have nothing to do with self, person, society. It is dissociated from the mental and physical welfare of the student, the academia and society as a whole. Secondly, the educational institute, particularly the university, is on the brink of losing its understanding of its own self. This is ironic, for the university has long been understood as the place where the terms of debate on the role of learning and teaching and the connections between learning and society have been set out. It is not a bad idea for this notion to be challenged, but what is happening today is that this role has been offset by narrowly political and politicised forces on the right.

Together, they point to a slow debilitation of the institutions of education, whose broad objectives had been at one level an indepth understanding of a subject, the discipline per se, and on the other, a meta theoretical and political narrative of critical consciousness as Paulo Friere most famously stressed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We are, in fact, witnessing the slow disempowerment of those who people education and its institutes, students, teachers, parents and others.

Universities and schools are under severe financial stress, one of the political atrocities committed upon them by successive governments. There is constant pressure upon universities to generate their own funds, opening the door to privatisation, through fee levying courses. Simultaneously, current, and dominant trends attempt to turn education itself into a set of corporate goods, through a fragmented, shallow mimicry of learning, calling for “skills” and “competencies.” We are daily accosted by circulars, surveys, studies, directives, lectures, ranging from authoritarian command to psychological pressure and lures, pushing for corporate skills instead of learning. Frequently, studies claiming to be rigorous research, undertaken by various agencies, provide rationalisations of commodification, corporatization and privatisation of education. World Bank country studies on Sri Lanka are notorious in this regard, and have been buttressed by studies by Pathfinder Foundation, IPS and others. The latest in this series is a British Council document The Role of Tertiary Education in Development that has made its way into the reading list of some universities.

In this neo liberal framework of the University, the teacher is a facilitator of knowledge, while the student is at the supermarket buying a package of goods for consumption. But neither the teacher nor the student is empowered in this new deal. The student-customer can only window shop at an empty super-market, while the teacher becomes a salesperson of goods that do not sustain either an economy or a socio-political culture.

The Myth of the Unemployable Graduate

The current estimate (2020) for unemployment is 5.4 %, as revealed by Sri Lanka Labour Force Survey, though the huge informal sector is not accounted for in this calculation. There is no clear measure of the unemployment rate of graduates in the state system. A tracer study done by the UGC in 2018 finds an overwhelmingly large number of Arts Graduates unemployed. Yet, a scrutiny of the research design and findings show untenable correlations and serious research bias, in instances like where the report says that of the 1265 participants, the overwhelming number of responses is from Arts Graduates. Such lopsidedness colours the findings. The study also draws our attention to the larger proportion of unemployed females compared to male graduates. Yet, there is no further exploration of this circumstance. The study suggests the availability of jobs and that if a graduate is not employed it is a “fault” in the student, or in the student’s circumstance. It never gets down to examining the availability of jobs and the places where jobs are most abundantly found. In the deliberations of the study, unemployment is causally attributed to the unemployability of the graduate. Yet, Sri Lanka: Labour Demand Survey 2017, of the Census and Statistics Department offers data for the Private Sector, demonstrating very clearly that many of the available jobs are in the apparel sector and security services; neither of which require a degree.

Forging a praxis

Education cannot just be about numbers and facts. A study of employment needs to raise questions concerning relations between the state, institutions, economy, education, culture and society. It is not a one-way traffic of authoritarian dicta, authoritarian inanities. At the outset, one needs to rethink assumptions about employability and employment. If we think of education as dynamic movements of co-existence, within the economy and society, centering the marginal, raising critical questions about justice, and undertaking explorations of society in that regard, we may arrive at a formulation where nobody is unemployable. For this, we need a careful in-depth study of circumstance. Our student is a part of that circumstance and is a dynamic social agent shaping that circumstance. It is the premise that we must begin with and hope to achieve. We must first eschew terms like employability, a dead end, and instead think of employment as an endless road, with infinite possibilities.

In outlining some of the immediate concerns about current trends besieging education, and in conceptualising education as a live, dialogic act of the subject as the individual and as a collective force, I have reinterpreted my student’s words as the greater empowerment of the vast number of people in this country. We need a better provision of education, greater democratisation of education and a grander vision for ourselves. With these thoughts we launch our fortnightly column on education: Kuppi Talk, where we will explore a range of issues concerning education and its potential to make for a better world in the weeks to come.

kuppitalk@gmail.com

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Features

The challenge of keeping value-based politics alive

Published

2 hours ago

2026/05/28

Sahan Weerasooriya

Anti-migrant protests in Durban, South Africa. BBC

The current outbreak of anti-immigrant protests in Durban, South Africa is bound to have taken many a subscriber to value-based politics or political idealism quite by surprise. After all, this is evidence that despite the historic accomplishments of nation-builders of the stature of the late President Nelson Mandela it cannot be taken for granted that identity politics, including racism in its worst forms, is no more in South Africa.

At the time of this writing details are scarce on the substantive root causes of the protests but it could very well be that economic grievances, particularly on the part of the majority community in South Africa, are contributing considerably to the disaffection. Shrinking employment and material prospects are likely to figure majorly among the factors igniting the unrest.

Fortunately, the local authorities in Durban are losing no time in calling for peaceful co-existence among the relevant communities and are pointing to the vital importance of stepping-up national integration processes. Apparently, immigrants in sizable numbers from neighbouring countries are present in Durban. However, international TV footage of the protests quoted some local authorities as saying that the majority of the immigrants in some centres that housed them were not illegal migrants and had the documents that entitle them to be in Durban.

In the Durban protests the world has fresh proof of the socially divisive consequences of the gathering globe-wide economic disaffection, touched off particularly by the continuing crisis in West Asia. Going ahead, the world would need to brace for increasing identity-based unrest of the kind it is just witnessing in South Africa.

Considering that the material lot of ordinary people everywhere could only aggravate progressively, with the US and Iran showing no signs of negotiating an end to their confrontation any time soon, it will be left to the more democratic and progressive sections of the world community to initiate positive measures collectively to bring a measure of relief to the discontented.

The swiftness with which such relief will be provided would depend crucially on the importance those sections taking up these undertakings attach to value-based politics as opposed to Realpolitik of power politics.

Going by these yardsticks, Italy could be considered to be moving in the right direction. Recently Italy came to the fore in initiating the collective named, ‘Rome Coalition for Food Security and Access to Fertilizer’, which has as one of its aims the swift provision of fertilizer to economically weak African countries.

In a recent statement Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Antonio Tajani, said that a principal aim of the project was to ensure that the farmers of Africa gained easy access to fertilizer, considering that food security is a growing concern among some of Africa’s economically vulnerable countries.

The statement went on to mention that some 30 countries hailing from the Mediterranean region, the Middle East, the Balkans as well as the FAO had been invited to join the coalition. The venture is far-seeing in that food security is main among the reasons for social discontent which in turn could degenerate into endemic political turmoil and bloodshed. Separatist violence and geographical fragmentation of countries wouldn’t be too far behind these developments, as Africa itself has often proved.

It is hoped that more G7 countries would take the cue from Italy and do what they could to ease the hardships of economically distressed countries, particularly of the global South. In these efforts they would need to break rank with the US, which is today brutally indifferent to the consequences of its policy of making ‘America First’, come what may.

Going by current developments, the Trump administration seems to be blithely oblivious to the wider, deleterious effects of its policy course in West Asia. Besides rendering Iran militarily and otherwise impotent nothing else seems to matter to Washington, as regards West Asia. This is policy short-sightedness of an extreme kind. After all, right now West Asia could be said to be sitting on the proverbial powder keg.

On the other hand, Iran is not giving the world the impression that it is doing anything constructive to get out of the policy straitjacket that it wove for itself decades ago. Rather than enter into a policy of ‘live and let live’ in relation to Israel in particular and initiate a process of reconciliation with the latter, it has chosen to operate within policy parameters that continue to damn Israel. This has put Israel always on the ‘defensive’ so to speak and prevented the opening up of space for meaningful dialogue.

That said, Israel is obliged to explore the possibilities of entering into a negotiatory process with the Arab-Islamic world that could lead to a de-escalation of tensions and bloodshed. It cannot continue to look at its neighbours through lenses that distort them as archetypal enemies who should be ‘wiped off completely from the face of the earth.’

In other words, the need is urgent for Realpolitik to give way to value-based politicks. Italy is beginning to prove that the latter approach could be pursued with some success. May be the EU and the UK could throw their weight behind these initiatives as well and establish that international politics could be refashioned on the basis of humane, civilized norms. The UN would need to be fully supportive of these moves and prove an organizational nucleus of the operations that follow.

In fact the time is ripe for people of conscience to collectively stand up on the side of peace and say ‘No’ to war and violence. Organizations such as the ICRC, the WHO and Medicines Sans Frontiers have already taken up this call. Referring to the widespread destruction of health facilities and their dehumanizing results these organizations have said, among other things, that ‘This is not a failure of the law. It is a failure of political will.’

True, ‘failure of political will’ among those powers that matter accounts for the runaway, uncontrollable nature of war and destruction in contemporary times, but more fundamentally it is a failure of the human conscience. It could very well be that the phenomenal levels to which violence and war have been unleashed today have had the effect of deadening consciences. This is a matter for urgent study and wide discussion.

Features

Vesak celebrations … with Cuteefly

Published

2 hours ago

2026/05/28

Sahan Weerasooriya

Perfect for celebrations, gifts, and meaningful occasions // Gift pack

I would describe Indunil Kaushalya Dissanayaka as innovative and creative, and she operates under the name of Cuteefly.

Indunil always comes up with something novel to celebrate special occasions, and she does it with candles … and that’s her profession.

She was in the spotlight when she created a happening scene, with candles, for Christmas, Sinhala and Tamil New Year, and Valentine’s Day.

As lanterns light up Sri Lanka for Vesak, the Colombo-based candle maker is quietly turning wax and wick into little pieces of the festival.

Candles reflecting Vesak themes

Her candles reflect Vesak themes – light, peace, remembrance, giving, etc., to enable you to fill your Vesak celebration with devotion and beauty.

Among her Vesak creations is a lotus-shaped soy candle, scented with sandalwood, lavender, etc., meant to burn during this Vesak Poya Day.

Indunil Kaushalya Dissanayaka: Customers
praise her for her creativity

These handcrafted Vesak candles are perfect for offering at the temple, she says.

What makes her creations so novel is that they come in different shapes, scents, themes, and all are handmade.

What’s more, her customers have heaped praise on her for her creativity.

According to Indunil, her creations are perfect as a thoughtful gift … to bring beauty, unity, and light into every moment.

Says Indunil: “Our beautifully handcrafted Unity candles are designed with premium detail and love, making them perfect for celebrations, gifts, and meaningful occasions.”

Cuteefly, says Indunil, is available online.

Readers could contact Indunil on 0778506066 for more details.

He Facebook Page is: Cuteefly.

Handmade with love

Features

Dark Spots …

Published

2 hours ago

2026/05/28

Sahan Weerasooriya

Yes, dark spots do crop up on the skin, especially with sun exposure and, of course, as the skin ages.

However, these tips should be of immense benefit to those who are faced with dark spots.

* Lemon and Honey Glow Mask:

You will need 01 teaspoon lemon juice and 01 teaspoon honey.

Mix the lemon juice and honey well and then apply this mixture, only on the dark spots.

Leave for 10–15 minutes and then rinse with cool water.

Benefits:

Lemon helps brighten pigmentation.

Honey moisturises and heals skin.

Gives a natural glow.

* Aloe Vera Gel Treatment:

All you need is fresh aloe vera gel.

Apply the gel apply on dark spots, before going to bed.

Leave overnight and wash in the morning.

Benefits:

Reduces acne marks and pigmentation.

Soothes irritated skin.

Helps skin repair naturally.

* Turmeric and Yoghurt Paste:

You will need 01 teaspoon yoghurt and a pinch of turmeric

Mix the yoghurt and turmeric into a smooth paste and apply on affected areas.

Leave for 15 minutes and then wash gently with lukewarm water.

Benefits:

Turmeric brightens skin naturally.

Yoghurt removes dead skin cells.

Helps fade dark spots gradually.

Use these packs 02-03 times a week as results are generally seen over time.

You can also try this out: Mix a ripe papaya into a smooth paste and apply to the face, or directly on to the dark spots. Leave for 15-20 minutes and then wash with lukewarm water.