Sanity prevails

Editorial-January 5, 2014, 8:33 pm 

The Grade Five Scholarship Examination (GFSE) will not be scrapped, the Cabinet spokesman has said. But for immense pressure the media, the Opposition and opinion leaders jointly brought to bear on the government it would have gone ahead with its harebrained project and done away with the only avenue available for hundreds of thousands of children to secure admission to leading schools. The government has done itself a big favour with weeks to go for provincial elections.

The Education Ministry has said its controversial proposal that the GFSE be reduced to a mere term test of sorts is based on recommendations by the National Education Commission (NEC), among other things. True, the general consensus is that the GFSE is a savagely grueling test, as it were, and amounts to torturing children at a very tender age. Ideally, it should be abolished. Parents force their little children to cram for that exam and score high marks even at the risk of becoming nervous wrecks in the process because the state has, under successive governments, failed to develop the education sector and many children are left without good schools. Therefore, before abolishing the GFSE the government ought to ensure that all schools are developed so that children don’t have to kill themselves to score very high marks at that examination, as we have argued in these columns ad nauseam.

The government tells us it has already launched a programme to develop 1,000 schools on a priority basis. It deserves praise. But, what about other schools where children lack even sanitary facilities?

Most of the arguments including those by the NEC against the GFSE are valid. But, the fact remains that it has become a necessary evil for tens of thousands of parents in that it provides their children with an opportunity to try to gain admission to schools of their choice. Depriving them of this opportunity is tantamount to violating one of their basic rights, we reckon.

When the children of ordinary parents sans political connections and/or the wherewithal to grease palms are treated in this manner frustration naturally wells up in them. In the late 1980s, it may be recalled, the JPV mobilised schoolchildren in its terrorist activities by effectively tapping the pent-up anger of the marginalised sections of society. Many schoolchildren perished at the hand of vigilantes and the rogue members of the armed forces and the police. The Suriyakanda mass grave where the skeletal remains of a group of children who had been tortured to death were unearthed is a case in point. The southern terrorists invented an attractive slogan to highlight the glaring urban bias in the allocation of state resources and attract the rural youth and schoolchildren to their macabre cause: Kolombata kiri gamata kekiri—milk for Colombo (read urban Sri Lanka) and melon for villages.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa has consistently carried rural electorates with ease at successive elections and floored the JVP repeatedly at the grassroots level as evident from the results of past electoral contests. But, it will be a mistake for him to be lulled into a false sense of complacency. Retrograde moves like the abortive attempt to scrap the GFSE before disadvantaged schools are developed are likely to cost him dear at future elections.

The issue of the state’s failure to develop schools boils down to lack of resources. Funds allocated for schools and universities have been woefully inadequate all these years. What needs to be done urgently is for the government to develop the education sector as a national priority. The abolition of the GFSE can wait. Let it be made less difficult immediately.