National Schools In Provinces: Is It A Success, Failure Or Myth?

By Thangamuthu Jayasingam –JUNE 8, 2019

Dr. Thangamuthu Jayasingam

It has always been a query of how success is measured. If you take the best students of an age group and train and have the best results against all the others, does it mean success or reiteration of  a known conclusion. Let us look at the results which were shown in research studies which indicated that the students who came in with extremely good results did not perform extremely well at the University while some who had marginally entered the University had performed extremely well at the University. Does it mean that our A levels are not the best option to measure academic potential or performance? In 1972 the standardization of the University entrance began and at that time it was stated that the discrepancy between the privileged districts and underprivileged districts would be reduced 5% each year by preferential development so that ion 20 years we will have MERIT and merit only. It is 2019(47 years since) and we do week cut off marks for districts and we are happy keeping those students in that level stating that we are compensating the A level result for University admissions little acknowledging that the education in those districts remain POOR and that matters more than the entrance of a few to the University. The recent announcement of potential closure is mostly in those districts where education has not been developed mainly because adequate resources have not been put into it and also associated monitoring of schools and the society for educating more people better. I think we have failed in the fundamentals of providing free education, good effective BASIC education for all.

Given the above preamble  let us look at the NATIONAL SCHOOLS CONCEPT. The State (Central Government )  provides better facilities to FEW schools in the district/province as  EDUCATION is a devolved subject and the province does not have adequate funds to provide for such facilities. These have political and policy issues attached which needs to be better understood.

1. If the funding is short why have not the provincial education been granted a better fund rather than to make specified schools better, which could also be done by a province.

The teachers in these schools have the same qualification as others and are often recruited direct or transferred from other provincial schools. They are only transferred among National schools or remain for long periods in one school. Their laboratory and library facilities may be better than the other schools. Number of staff in especially higher grades are higher than in other schools in most cases.

2. Why should this be? A common system for all in the province should be operative for avoidance of complications and comparisons. Operation of two systems always makes it difficult as they are always compared, sometimes unfairly.

Identification of schools for NATIONAL SCHOOL DESIGNATION are those that are doing well in the district/province and have shown potential for development.

3. We are making the big, bigger but are not looking at the small which really needs attention. This is typical capitalist approach. It is for this reason students clamor to come to these school leaving their schools in the neighborhood which makes some school abandoned and thus identified for closure. It also causes hardship to parents to shift them to a national school away from the rural or less urban school (most NATIONAL SCHOOLS ARE IN THE RELATIVE URBAN SETUP). They spend more money for ‘FREE EDUCATION’ as a result of trying to send their children to another government school but NATIONAL. We fail the free education concept.

Performance of the National schools are better than those of the NON NATIONAL SCHOOLS which is by design as those schools which performed well have been chosen as NATIONAL SCHOOLS and this it is only a recognition and addition of facilities. If a poor performing school is taken and improved, then there is a credit involved, but, not in this formula.  But we forget one factor, THE NATIONAL SCHOOLS AND NON NATIONAL SCHOOLS SIT FOR THE SAME A LEVEL EXAMINATION. If a non-national school candidate appeals to the Courts that he/she had been subjected to discrimination by treating unequal as equal, I would not be surprised,  if the court rules in favor of the non-national school  student requesting  for a cut off mark different(lower than) to the national schools as the difference is already built into the system making it unequal. It is the same as much as have been practiced currently between the different districts for which adjustments are made by different cutoff marks to compensate for it. It would be correct in my opinion that they be treated different as they are not equal to the national schools in the above arguments, which affect them considerably. Treating ‘unequal as equal’  is also a violation of fundamental right, in policy.

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