Sugath Kulatunga

It is good news that the President is keen on establishing a branch of an Indian IIT in Kandy. It appears that Prime Minister Modi has agreed to support the Chennai IIT to launch the project. It is never too late, but the President should not consider that one IIT is the panacea for all the IT backwardness of the country and a magic wand to provide productive employment to all our school leavers. While a workforce with IT skills can act as a magnet for foreign investment the need is for a comprehensive transformation of the education system to meet the demands of the presence and the future.

Mr. Wickremasinghe was our Minister of Education in 1980. This was the time that the East Asian Tiger economies were making radical changes in their systems of education to meet the emerging needs of industrialization and economic development. They used education to spur growth, create jobs and raise productivity. In these countries Education was a primary driver of their long-term development strategy and was a high priority for policy makers. There was strong alignment in their growth strategy, labor market needs, and education policies.”

But at that time in the 80s Mr.Wickremasinghe as Minister of Education or as the Minister of Industries was not cocerned in the developments taking place in those fast growing economies. Neither did the Ministry bureaucracy interested in learning from the experience of these countries. Our diplomatic representatives in those countries followed the philosophy of the three wise monkeys of ‘no seeing, no hearing, no speaking’, while enjoying their perks. The think tanks of the Central Bank and the Academics of the Universities were not different.

An attempt to introduce an element of change in the school education system in the form of the NCGE for School leavers was made during the government of Mrs. Bandaranayake but was scrapped by the next government falling back on the British based system of Ordinary Level and Advanced level certification. While SL deliberately ignored technical education, after independence India established in 1950 five Institutes of Technology (IITs) in the main States of the country. These IITs were modeled on the best example of higher technical education from Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They have been the cutting edge of technology development in India and are highly recognized internationally. There was a strong demand for IIT alumni in the Silicon Valley. IITs are considered one of the great gifts to India by Prime Minister Nehru.

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CEOs of many tech multi nationals like google,infosys,Sun Micro Systems and Twitter are IIT graduates. India depends on IIT alumni to provide technological solution to the future world. Recently Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on the global alumni base of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) to come up with viable technological solutions for the emerging new world technology order post the Covid-19 pandemic.

This writer having worked in India and was familiar with the contribution of the IITs to India has in the past recommended that Sri Lanka establishes an Institute of Technology in collaboration with one of the Indian IITs.

(On a personal Note) : In the early 2000 this writer was associated with an Indian investor in an attempt to launch a Colombo Institute of Technology with inputs from IIT Chennai and IIT Bangalore. Their staff would have served as visiting lecturers and maintain the high standards of the Indian institutions supplemented by local professionals. We were in the process of identifying local resource persons and a suitable building for the proposed Institute. When in April of that year the Elephant Pass was captured by the LTTE, and they advanced up to the gates of Jaffna. In that tense juncture a conceited MP of the TNA rhetorically advised  the government to be ready with 40,000 body bags implying that the LTTE would wipe out the SL Army in Jaffna. It was then the gossip that if that happened no Tamil would be spared in Colombo. The Indian investor naturally got cold feet and flew back overnight to India. That was the fate of the proposed Colombo Institute of Technology.

A single IIT is not a solution to produce the manpower to fulfill the future needs of the economy and attract investors. It could of course become a model for changing the education system in our universities. The crying need is to revamp the education system to meet the present and future needs of the economy of the county and provide productive and gainful employment to our school leavers.

South Korea transformed itself in a few decades from an underdeveloped nation to an industrialized country exporting high-technology products (Domjahn 2013, p. 16). Much of this development is attributed to improvements in the country’s education system. South Korea placed education at the center of its long-term development strategy, Various South Korean and international scholars (Ellinger and Beckham 1997; Han 1994; Kim 2000) have credited the nation’s economic success to an efficient education system that provides the quality workforce necessary for economic expansion.

Taiwan ROC” is an Island smaller than Sri Lanka with a similar population. Before 1980s it was a predominantly an agricultural economy. Today it is a high tech powerhouse leading the world in a number of high tech industries. It has a per capita income of 36, 000 dollars. At the beginning of the 1980s, Taiwan changed its education policy radically, gave priority to technical education and increased the ratio for senior vocational schools and general high school to 7:3. By 2012 there were 155 senior vocational schools, 14 junior colleges, and 77 universities/colleges of science & technology, totaling 246. It is the education system that has sustained the significant development of this small nation. According to the Minister of Education in Taiwan Technical and vocational education has played a decisive role by nurturing the range of human resources required for our basic national infrastructure and for promoting economic development, and contributed enormously to bringing about what has been acclaimed as Taiwan’s economic miracle”. (Se-Hwa Wu, PhD Minister, MOE.)

The education policy must be an integral component of the industrial and technological policy of the nation. We do not have even an independent policy of any of these elements. It is useful to have the agricultural policy also included in this policy package. In the Far Eastern economies the education system was geared to support the implementation of these integrated policies. In general STEM education was emphasized. At the same time structure of the education system was overhauled for the delivery of education including vocational training. Youth unemployment is a problem which confronts every government. In Sri Lanka unemployability of youth produces by the present system is a serious problem mainly due to the neglect of vocational education and training.

The German dual system offers a very practical approach to skill development,

covering initial vocational education and training, further vocational education

and training, careers, employability, occupational competence and identity.

Thanks to the dual system, Germany enjoys low youth unemployment and high

level skills.

In Germany, about 50 percent of all school-leavers undergo vocational training

provided by companies which consider the dual system the best way to ac-

quire skilled staff. it is a highly regulated and well-regarded system whereby young people learn through a mix of ‘on-the-job’ training as well as in the classroom. Typically, learners will spend 70% of time in the workplace and 30% at college.”

Sri Lanka should learn from the successful educational systems of the Far East as well as in countries like in the West.