Prof. Wisawa Warnapala, minister for higher education, was invited to say a few words at the University Librarians Association annual conference on June 8th and he took nearly one hour to reminisce about the good old times, complain about the non-academic staff, faculty and lack of scholarship, students and lack of love of learning and many other ills of the university system. Then he went on (again*) to stress the need for a vision, mission, goals objectives etc. This is coming from a man who, on his own admission, has been in positions of power in the academia for decades, and then since 1996 or so, in politics. He is not the only one in power to complain and not to do anything.
Continuing with the post on “real issue is the pass rate at Grade 9,” I like go further and suggest that at this stage of development we need to spend our tax rupees on those completing Grade 1-9 basic education, and the rest should be asked to pay according to their means. (Yes, this means that all university students should be asked to pay something for their education, if not now, but later as they do with the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) in Australia). The labor force data for Sri Lanka are most revealing in this regard, particularly when you benchmark against another country. There are 9 major occupational categories. To make the following table I lumped three categories together (proprietors/managers;senior officials or managers; and professionals) for simplicity and then arranged Sri Lanka’s numbers in ascending order.
A comment by Kusal in this forum about linking education and development prompted me to write this. He is right on target. We often hear about the 20,000 who qualify for university every year and how few actually get in. Now the latest furor is about only 48% passing the O/L when the pass rate has actually been increasing over the years. The more important statistic, I believe, is the pass rate after Grade 9, the end of compulsory education in Sri Lanka.
A news item in Lankadeepa last week says that Grade 1-5 would be removed from National schools and set up as separate neighborhood schools for which admissions would be solely based on proximity to the school. At this point these are only recommendations made in response to a supreme court decision making current system of admissions unconstitutional. At the seminar on “Year 1 Admissions” that the Education Forum held sometime back we indeed posed that option as a solution to the year-1 admissions problem. Should all government-run popular schools get out of primary education, reserving all class spaces, including those freed up by the closure of elementary schools, to those who pass the 5th grade scholarship exam? And we received support for the argument from those who gathered.
 Keith Ng    16 May 2007  “The Future. Today.” boasts a rusty billboard pushing mobile phone service in Batticaloa, a coastal town in Sri Lanka’s troubled eastern province. Batticaloa is at the center of a renewed military campaign to drive out the separatist forces of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. From bases around the district and from the town itself, government artillery bombards suspected Tiger positions day and night.
Or Has IT even begun to matter in the business sector in Sri Lanka? Is it because we focus on the technology, not the information management applications of IT? Does the problem lie with IT educators who have not had exposure? Does IT Matter?’’ was the topic of the LBR-LBO Chief Information Officer Forum yesterday (May 16, 2007).
There have been some posts about IT education in Sri Lanka. This article, written and first appeared in a business magazine in 2003, illustrates the job opportunities in the Sri Lankan IT field and what sort of education one should have to target the entry level jobs available in the market. Things might have changed a bit since then, but there might be few still who might find it useful. Jobs in IT – What path to follow?  It sounds so peculiar that once we lived in a world where there was not a single ‘IT Professional’.
Councils in England are being reminded that parents have the right to educate their children at home if they wish. Proposed Department for Education and Skills guidelines on “elective home education” stress that education is compulsory but schooling is not. Councils should offer support to home educators, and parents must see that their children are suitably educated. But the authorities have no right to enter people’s homes or make routine checks on children’s progress. The department has been discussing the issue with several groups representing home educators and with local authorities.
What happened to National ICT Education Drive ? As we all agree ICT Literacy is considered as one of the very important components of the Education in the 21st century. Since 1980s various attempts were made to bring computers into the school curriculum. Unfortunately only in 2004, ICT was introduced as a subject in Grade 12 (A/L) (GIT) and subject in O/L(OL-IT) in Sri Lanka. In 2005 Ministry of Education launched an ICT Literacy Drive proposing Department of Examination to conduct ICT Literacy Examination Island wide.
A seminar on “Knowledge for Development (K4D): The Role of Universities” was held on Jan 25, 2007 at Taj Samudra in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The first half of the seminar dealt with information issues in higher education. In the session titled “country reports” country representatives described the state of higher education in four countries in Asia and some references to data collection efforts in those countries. The country reports were presented by Dr. Catherine (Caren) Castañeda, Director for Programs and Standards at the Commission on Higher Education In Philippines, Dr.