Features
The United States and social democracy
by Kumar David
The Scandinavian countries are held up as models of social democracy. The distribution of wealth and after-tax income is more egalitarian than elsewhere, freedom of expression, the press and religious rights are not restricted, the people choose their governments at free and fair elections and there is uninhibited licence in sex related frolics. Conversely, purist-leftists point out that the “economic system” throughout Scandinavia is capitalist; big enterprises and the commanding heights of industry and commerce are the property of a shy bourgeoisie. Production, reproduction and appropriation of surplus value conform to textbook definitions of capitalism. Both sides of have their point, but Scandinavia is not my topic today, it is the United States not so much for its intrinsic interest but because change there will inevitably spark global trends.
My friends Marjorie and Geoffrey in Orange County, California, are to all appearances fit, able and charming people. They down their beers, puff on their cigarettes, go for walks, drive two nice big SUVs and run a small business. But they collect social disability cheques of $600 a month each for some invisible frailty and their case is typical of maybe millions of others. Likewise the current labour shortage in the US is in part a constructed malaise. Small businesses cannot attract employees. People find it better to stay at home and collect unemployment benefits while others will only accept part-time jobs. You can get more by filing for part-time unemployment benefits and getting paid for half-day’s work. Small businesses say the problem is acute.
The shopping carts at Walmart, Cusco, Vons and such supermarkets are full to the brim and queues at checkout counters are long and slow. Some of this is thanks to huge Covid-relief monies pumped into personal bank accounts in recent months and therefore atypical. But obesity has been bursting at the seams for three decades. The point is that there is trickle down of material wealth to low-income classes in the US. This of course is not socialism but it keeps the wolf of revolution at bay. Still it’s an odd version of capitalism if you go by the classics. Sure, brash billionaires, coarse captains of giant technology companies and cigar chomping industrialists garner big profits and avoid tax using Pandora’s Box havens. America being what it is, matters soft and genteel in Scandinavia are loud and brash. It would be absurd to say that the same degree of income equity prevails in the US as in Scandinavia. Still the material lives of the four lowest (lower 80%) of the American income quintiles is not pitiable and not too far from Scandinavian averages.
Data for three countries a few years ago (comparative ratios have hardly changed):
In the Pie-chart of US GNP one might for simplicity imagine that federal and state government expenditure (16.6%) is spent mostly on the people (Medicare, social services, education and unemployment benefits) while conversely the 17.7% private domestic investment belongs to the rich (stock-market, new enterprises, grand houses). The big slice (68.5%) is consumption. One can conjecture (a bit risky but let me take the risk) that half of this is spent by the lower two-thirds of society and the other half by the top one-third. How much grand-crux wines can the rich consume and how many first-class air-tickets relish? Unless my guesswork is way out of order this means that 51% (16.6 + half of 68.5) is consumed by the lower two-thirds of society. What I am saying is that despite income inequality, the redistributive outcome of taxation and government support (above all health care) defuses pressure. [To pre-empt nit-pickers I need to admit that sales tax is carried mainly by the yako-classes and income tax is part paid by middle and lower-middle classes. Furthermore, government expenditure includes the likes of defence which hardly benefits the daily life of ordinary people].
Pie-chart
Bar-chart 1 shows household income spread. This is not Scandinavian social democracy but neither is it grotesque inequality which will incite the masses to pour out on the streets pitchfork in hand. American capitalism keeps yakos in line by dishing out a share of the pie while ours do it by intoning hela jathika abimane.
Bar-chart 1
This is not to deny that the filthy rich are getting richer at everyone else’s expense – I have no quarrel with Thomas Piketty. Bar chart 2 shows that the top-5% of income “earners” have hogged the largest part of the gains in the last three decades. Nevertheless this has to be taken in the context of a general upward swing of median US household income in the last half-century, see Graph. This is partly because the global hegemony of the US dollar, abominations like the Vietnam War and stooge Latin American dictators for much of the Twentieth Century. All this allowed imperialist and neo-liberal transfer of value created elsewhere in the world to the US. Nevertheless being rich does contribute to social complacency and cools the ardour of the poorer classes.
Bar-chart 2
I have inflicted quite enough statistical injury and economic boredom on you for one Sunday. I move on by asserting that American democracy, battered though it has been in recent years by the far-right and by Trump’s antics, is durable. The power of the anti-vaccination lobby, though cerebrally retarded in the eyes of outsiders is grassroots, albeit cretin, populism in the terrain of America’s anything-goes democracy. Another example is that Black Rights Matter mobilisation in response to racist police brutality, actually consists of a majority of white marchers. The jealous independence of the judiciary is legendary. Determination to exert constitutional rights, despite grotesque displays like the freedom to run amok with guns, the right to infect others with Covid and such manifestations thought crazy elsewhere, are muscular exertions of spirited populism which would have had regimes reach for the machine gun in third world countries. For better for worse American populism is loud, brash and vibrant; it is not staid Scandinavia.
Graph
Lest you imagine I am composing a panegyric I must recount the grotesque underside of America, the hundreds of thousands of homeless street sleepers. Los Angeles has over 25,000 and New York even more; every big city has hundreds, some thousands. It is something you will not see in any European city or China, Korea or Hong Kong – perhaps a few psychologically disturbed people but not on a mass scale. Those who know Bombay or Calcutta are familiar with what I am saying on a much larger scale. But America is super rich so why you will ask aren’t a few thousand housing blocks being constructed, why is the state not funding a social welfare department? Honestly, I don’t know the answer. And the huge prison population – that’s a sign of social sickness.
I also have a grouse which is personal. The spread of political correctness in priggish sections of society and in main-stream media is tiresome. I suggest that red-blooded persons ignore it and speak and act like normal humans. Some persons we are reminded are lesbian, homo, bi, auto or omnisexual, but what’s the need to insert sympathetic references to this at every turn of dialogue? Don’t retch but the latest 007 has become a pansy. And if you want to give the American accent a slip, welcome to the club.
But come on, this is all trivial stuff.
The unschooled and the intellectually handicapped imagine that socialism is only about rescuing the poor from material hardship, to hell with political and democratic rights. This twist gained currency because the great revolutions of the Twentieth Century were in dirt poor countries and the revolutionary state was compelled to prioritise “bread, land and peace” and to repel foreign aggressors. Fair enough, but states so conceived unavoidably turned out to be caricatures of socialism – say the USSR, China and Cuba. True they fed the masses but that’s only half the game, and indeed some capitalist ones have done well too – Japan, South Korea, Singapore and the Chinese province of Taiwan. You don’t need to consult the classics to be familiar with the axiom that socialism asserts it is a higher form of civilisation. Readers I am sure are familiar with “The freedom of each ensures the freedom of all”; “Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious”; “The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal”, and such aphorisms. Socialism sans democracy is an oxymoron.
You will appreciate where I am going. Socialism is not about bread alone but also about cognizance and liberty. But first I have more to say about bread in the United States. The Biden Administration, driven by the left-wing of the Democratic Party, is pushing the$3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act spending plan. Add to this the $1 trillion infrastructure bill already approved and it becomes a humongous $4.5 trillion programme. To give you an idea, of scale, the US spent $13 billion (about $ 160 billion in today’s money) on the Marshal Plan, an economic recovery programmes for Western Europe after World War II. The proposals American progressives are pushing is an order of magnitude larger in substance and in trickle down money. Republicans, big business and about 1,500 paid Congressional lobbyists are fighting it tooth and nail.
My conclusion is straightforward. It is easier for the United Sates to move towards socialism than for any other country including China. Regimes with a bogus ‘Democratic Socialist’ tag on their brand name are a hoax. America and China are the only countries which can serve as global prototypes. But since it is a truism that Socialism can only flourish on a world scale that means, right now, it’s Hobson’s choice. I am no starry-eyed dreamer unaware of the pernicious extension of the by no means forever bygone Cold War, nor the menace of another conceivable Hot War. The world is replete with dangerous neo-fascists; Trump has plenty of company. My purpose in this essay, nevertheless, is to remind readers of dimensions of this story other than the trite. I am confident that democracy will not die in the US short of civil war. It’s impossible to reverse history against mighty odds and proto-fascism will be destroyed in such a civil war. Hence, I have no option but to differ from my carousing buddy Vijaya Chandrasoma – “How Democracies Die”, Sunday Island 17 October – about the impending death of democracy in America. VC is familiar with Mark Twain’s quip re exaggerated announcements of his demise.
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.
By Sivamohan Sumathy
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