Sri Lanka Education Forum

Today, September 08, is World Literacy Day. According to the UNDP's definition, literacy rate is the percentage of people aged 15 and above who can, with understanding, both read and write a short, simple statement about their everyday life. In Sri Lanka we currently enjoy a literacy rate of over 96% , higher than that expected for a country with our income level. We have enjoyed high literacy rates for sometime. The question is why we have not moved much beyond basic literacy. Sri Lanka is small country with a high population density. Our natural resource endowments are grossly exaggerated. Our ...

What does S&T capacity mean for a small developing country such as Sri Lanka? My conversations with distinguished scientist and educator, Prof. Kamini Mendis, helped me develop some working hypotheses for my research and also spew out some ideas for action.  Prof. Kamini Mendis is in town for a short holiday. She is currently the Senior Advisor to the Roll Back Malaria Program at the World Health Organization (WHO). She moved to WHO after an illustrious career as a professor of Parasitology at the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Colombo where she published a record number of papers and ...

What should the Ed forum do next? We have so many options. Our recent seminar on Year-1 Admissions alone pointed us in several directions. Then the President decreed that henceforth all tertiary education institutions shall be reviewed by the government. That's good, but quality assurance of education is too important to be left to government. In quality assurance in education, typically, government agencies and civil society organizations play complementary roles (more on that later). Therefore, at this point, the Education forum will focus its energies on collecting information and ranking education choices for school leavers, and disseminating the information ...

A University for Uva Wellassa, the 14th university in Sri Lanka's public university system, was opened on August 7. To the average citizen who pays for these ventures through every purchase he/she makes (except milk powder and LPG, as of yesterday) this is a not so joyous birth of a 14th child to a public university family with 13 other mouths to feed. (One interesting development is the appointment of a non-academic to the Vice-Chancellor position, more on that later). Our universities are short on everything. Short on resources and short on talent, both academic and managerial. We should be devoting ...

In Sri Lanka almost 90% of school-age children complete Grade 11, the grade that marks the end of the senior secondary school, but only 37% of those qualify at the GCE (O/L) examination and proceed to Grades 12 and 13, the collegiate years. Therefore, for all practical purposes, the typical school leaving age in Sri Lanka is 16, the age of an average student completing Grade 11 in Sri Lanka. We use the term 16+ to characterize the full range of school leavers no matter when they leave school. Where do our school leavers go? A recent World Bank report estimates ...

If we care about our children: Ridding year-1 school admissions of corruption and influence by Rohan Samarajiva Tamil Version Sinhala Version 1.0 Introduction Getting a child into Year 1 of school, government or private, has become a traumatic and unpleasant event. Principals are being arrested for taking bribes, court cases are being launched, parents stand in line through the night, and children are being coached to lie about where they live. The problem which was originally concentrated in government schools, has now reached crisis proportions even in private schools, with bribes being taken on top of the already very high ...