By Panduka Karunanayake

Professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine and former Director, Staff Development Centre, University of Colombo

(The 34th J.E. Jayasuriya Memorial Lecture14 February 2025 SLFI Auditorium, Colombo)

Professor J.E. Jayasuriya is remembered today for his work in so many diverse aspects of the field of education. Indeed, one can be forgiven for wondering whether this is just one person or a combination of several. These aspects include his excellence as a teacher and a writer of textbooks on Mathematics; a renowned school principal, handpicked by Dr C.W.W. Kannangara to establish the first Central College; an able administrator; a Professor of Education in the University of Ceylon and a leading academic; a pioneer in the fields of educational psychology, population education and even my own area of medical education; a policymaker, analyst and commentator at both national and international levels; an advocate and political activist; an internationally recognised expert and author; and last but not least, a great teacher and much-loved mentor. My own debt to his work would be patently obvious to anyone who reads my book Ruptures in Sri Lanka’s Education, in which I have relied heavily on his insightful analyses. It is no surprise, therefore, that this memorial lecture had been delivered in the past by some of the most eminent women and men of intellect produced by our country, not only from the field of education but even other fields. I am truly humbled when I think of the stature of this great intellectual or read the list of those eminent past speakers. I will strive to do justice to the expectations placed on me by the J.E. Jayasuriya Memorial Foundation when they invited me to join that list of names, and I thank the President and Management Council of the Foundation. Following in Professor Jayasuriya’s path, in this lecture I, too, will deal with education as a social institution and look at it through a wide-angle lens.

Ladies and Gentlemen: For some time now, I have been impressed by the education-related work of the great Indian intellectual Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). (His actual name in Bengali is Robindronat Thakur: the name Rabindranath Tagore is an anglicisation, much better known across the world than the Bengali original.) Tagore was, of course, a very famous person: the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize; a well-known poet, lyricist, musician, dramatist, novelist and painter; a polymath; an inspiring writer and public speaker; a social reformer; a philosopher; and one of the most widely travelled Indians of his generation and, unsurprisingly, an internationalist. In fact, his work on education – while an amazing labour of love – might be thought of as a lesser known part in his fame. In this lecture, I wish to delve specifically on his work on education.

One could point out that he carried out his iconoclastic experiments in education a century ago, and that the educational institutions that he created back then exist now only in name. Their original nature has changed with the rigors of time. So am I here trying to recreate a world one hundred years past and propagate nostalgia? If you bear with me, I trust you will find that my reasons are better than that.

The reason why I was so impressed with his work is the significant currency of his ideas to the contemporary world. Now this will immediately seem like a contradiction. If the ideas are still current, why did the institutions that were based on those ideas have to change with time?

I would explain these two contradictory positions by saying that his ideas were actually prescient – they weren’t sustained, because they were ahead of their time. Besides, although he correctly identified problems and designed effective solutions, the problems were not fully solved by them – because of asymmetrical power relations and lack of funding. Today, we see the same problems throughout the globe – in all their enormity, reach and complexity. They engulf us and in a way blind us, because we have been trained to think that the reasons underlying them are ‘natural givens’. And by a quirk of fate, the solutions are now hidden in the sands of time.

Let me offer a quick illustration of this. We can clearly identify elements of humanistic education in Tagore’s ideas, even though humanistic education itself was recognised only some decades after his death and still hasn’t permeated education widely.

In this lecture, I would invite you to retrace my own steps into his educational philosophy. I, too, began with the belief that his ideas were hopelessly out of tune with our times. That was because I had been trained to see the world of education in a certain way, and from that position Tagore’s ideas seemed alien. I am reminded of something that Marcel Proust wrote: “The real journey of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” But as we all know, letting go of existing perceptions and forming entirely new ones is probably the hardest thing for the human mind to do. And yet, as any good educator would tell you, learning to form new perceptions is the very essence of education.

Current education landscape and its discontents

Let me start with a proposition. Education in today’s world needs a fundamental reposturing – not because it is doing its job badly but because it is doing the wrong job. Everywhere we can see educational institutions doing a great job, but our society is no better for it. This state of affairs hasn’t risen suddenly or recently; rather, it has been emerging slowly and developing over a century or so.

Let us examine the last one hundred years or so. During this time, throughout the world, democratisation has given expanding access to education, decolonisation has helped to switch the medium of instruction from colonising languages to the mother tongue, expanding industries and middle class populations have led to increasing massification of university education, and the human capital theory has led to increasing investment and growth in all levels of education. Can anyone in education think of a better century?

But during this same period, what has education given society? Chemists invented the weapons of the First World War. Physicists invented the weapons of the Second World War. Biologists bequeathed us biological weapons. Medicine became more successful and less trustworthy. Economics created economic hit men and cross-border practices that made markets volatile and national economies vulnerable. The law reduced community rights and increased patent rights. Mass communications, which could not give populations any democratic skills, could nevertheless give them insatiable consumerism. Social scientists have not explained the underlying reasons, much less solve them, but continue to create faultlines in societies and fragment them. The humanities have failed to bring the human family closer. And the biggest invention that technology has given us thus far is climate change.

It would not be enough to merely put the blame for all this on a few demagogues or dictators – throughout this period, populations had at least acquiesced with them and had often strengthened them. The purpose of education should have been to give the masses the skill to avoid these traps, but instead, the masses have been compliant while the experts have been selling their souls. This is why I said that education – assuming it was doing its job well – has been doing the wrong job.

The question of why education went to work for ‘the wrong boss’ has intrigued me for some time now, all the more because I know that during this whole period, policymakers and educationists have mostly been genuine in their intentions. My earliest clues came from two writers from the 1960s and 1970s. The first was the iconoclastic social critic Ivan Illich (1970) who published the book Deschooling Society. The second was a relatively unknown American education administrator, Grant Venn (1965, 1971).

Venn pointed out that throughout the twentieth century, the role that was required of education in society was undergoing a gradual change, although its response was not forthcoming. The general organisational structure of education everywhere was one that had been inherited from the time of the Industrial Revolution, but changing times were demanding a new structure. But educationists everywhere were not perceptive to it. They merely kept the old structure and tried to tinker with it.

In the old days, the majority of schoolchildren were destined to end up in farms, mines or manufactories, and they only needed an education in the 3 R’s and some basic disciplines such as punctuality. Only a few had to be selected and groomed for higher office. Learning how to live well, on the other hand, was acquired quite easily outside of school. The school itself played a relatively small role in people’s lives, except for the select few, and nobody would have equated education to school-going, because much of education happenned outside school. Our organisational structure was one that was created for this era.

But all this changed after the increasing domination of scientific technology in society. Thereafter, more schoolchildren had to be educated to a higher level – as tasks transformed from physical ones to cognitive ones, ‘work’ transformed into ‘jobs’, and the preparation needed for a life transformed from apprenticeship to prolonged schooling. Schools became a pervasive presence in people’s lives and tied them to their destinies, both individually and at the national level. Gradually, education became equated to school-going – learning how to live well, which had been learnt outside school, became sidelined, ignored and eventually lost.

As Venn observed:

[C]hanges now confronting us must be thought about in terms of certain new relationships that have developed between man, education, and society. Essentially, for the first time in man’s history, education is the link between an individual and society; and for the

first time this is true for every individual. Education, instead of a selection agency, must become an including agency.

When he suggested here that education must change from a selection agency to an including agency, he was referring to inclusion in the world of work and community, rather than merely inclusion in the school. In other words, he wasn’t talking about access to education – he was worried about what would happen to school-leavers when they go to live in the world outside.

If we look back at how education did respond, we would see that it has been preoccupied with strengthening the link between school and work. Let’s take Sri Lanka. In the 1970s we had pre-vocational studies. In the 1980s we had life skills. In the 1990s we had soft skills. In the 2000s we had twenty-first century skills. Nowadays we have industry-based capstone projects and entrustable professional activities. By and large, these were not our own inventions – they were simply the global responses replicated locally. But even these had no chance of success, because while education could prepare school-leavers for jobs, the economy still had to create those jobs. Without that, all one could have is what Ronald Dore (1976) forewarned us: qualification inflation and qualification escalation. In the 1960s the human capital theory suggested that education could serve as a springboard for economic development, and there were, indeed, some early successes, such as with Japan and South Korea. But more recently, that theory, too, has run into controversies and failure.

The failure to adapt to these changing circumstances manifested as what we see today in its fully developed form. We have over-indulged ourselves in designing education to chase after employment, and compromised education’s role in preparing students to be citizens in the community. This is not to say that education should not have played a role in economic development or preparing its students for the world of work. It is to point out the loss of balance in achieving these two goals: economic development on the one hand and human flourishing on the other hand.

But while education may have lost sight of the second goal, it also didn’t do very well promoting the first goal. Even here, it has lost its way.

After the Cold War ended in the 1990s a bipolar world was replaced by a unipolar world, with ‘all roads leading to Washington’. When that happened, a more balanced use of technology – what used to be known in the 1970s as ‘appropriate technology’ – was replaced by the use of often highly expensive and inappropriate technology that came tied to funding. This was because the global economy was capitulating to the major industries and multinational corporations and conglomerates, which were initially situated in the West but are now situated in other countries, too. We can conceptualise these as the ‘core’ in the ‘core-periphery relationship’ in global financing, knowledge production and commoditisation.

The reason why education lost its way is because that, too, became merged with – and disappeared into – this core-periphery relationship. Education ceased to serve local communities or support appropriate technology, and instead began serving the interests of big industries and promoting inappropriate technological behemoths. In the past, a well-educated person was one who served one’s community well – today the well-educated person is one who works for a successful global industrial giant.

One of the interesting changes in education that was promoted by the World Bank in the 1990s was the concept of the ‘three E’s’ of education: effectiveness, equity and efficiency. They were meant to help align educational systems to national goals. But they were overly quantitative, promoting measurable outcomes and ignoring the unmeasurable ones. What they succeeded in doing is replacing the broad goals of education with immediately measurable outcomes. Thus, quality was pushed aside in favour of effectiveness, and value-for-money in favour of efficiency. Insidiously, we also began chasing after the measurable parameters that served the industries in the core countries. Today, we judge ourselves by their indices, such as webometrics, accreditations and citations.

Even before these quantitative indices emerged, Venn asked some insightful questions about ‘quality’. Can quality be measured based on how well the institution serves those most in need of education rather than only those who are lucky, or defined in terms of how well individual differences and unique talents are developed rather than how well students become like all others, or in terms of one’s behaviour and contributions after one leaves school rather than on what one does while in school? Can accreditation be based on how well the school succeeds in its own goals rather than those of other schools? Can status for an educational institution be gained by how well it meets unfilled needs of society rather than how much it is like recognised institutions? We ought to have focused on these tasks; but instead, we have lost these unmeasurable attributes in our rush to comply with measurable parameters.

But it is not merely that this approach has robbed society of important attributes that were unmeasurable. Arguably, even those who were ‘successfully educated’ lack a wholesome education. This had been noted even before the 1990s, as when Aldous Huxley wrote in his book Psychedelics:

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education…fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the Humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s.

To use a phrase from his book, we have mistaken the menu for the meal!

So what kind of different organisational structure would help us achieve this balance? Let me quote Illich, as he hints the answer:

Everyone learns how to live outside school. We learn to speak, to think, to love, to feel, to play, to curse, to politick and to work without interference from a teacher… Increasingly, educational research demonstrates that children learn most of what teachers pretend to teach them from peer groups, from comics, from chance observations,…”

– and to this, today I could add ‘from social media and the Internet’.

In other words, although the education-industry link is important, we need to realise that education itself is a lot more than this role. In order to capture the other important goals of education, we must broad-base it. Education is not something that happens only in the syllabus; it happens outside it, too. It is not something that is destined to enter only the workplace; it enters our private lives and community life, too. In fact, its true value lies therein. We need to rediscover this balance – this broader concept of education.

It is when we begin to see the true role of education in this way that we can begin to see sense in Tagore’s ideas. So now, it is time to turn to him.