by Douglas King

Sri Lanka may not have achieved much success at the Olympic Games but Education Minister Susil Premajayantha is confident that Sri Lanka can achieve 100% literacy by 2015. This remarkable promise will ensure that it will be the first and probably only country ever to achieve such a goal. There are two aspects of Sri Lanka that the government takes pride in and that never change. The first is that the people of Sri Lanka are friendly and perpetually happy as they are always smiling; The second is a boasts of a literacy rate well over 90% and equal to many developed countries and certainly the highest in South Asia.

Friendliness and smiling are difficult to measure, but with the rapidly escalating cost of living and the daily death toll on both sides of the conflict in the North, there doesn’t seem a lot to smile about. But surely 100% literacy is not possible here or anywhere else, except maybe in North Korea where a department of creative statistics can claim anything. Are children included in literacy tables, and from what age? What about those individuals with severe learning difficulties or even mild difficulties, who lack the mental facilities to become literate? There are also a large number of elderly people who suffer from senile dementia, who certainly have lost their literacy. So we would have to restrict the 100% literate to those between the ages of 15 and 65 years who do not have severe mental retardation and have had access to schooling. The students who drop out of schools without functional literacy, will not be included in the 100% statistics or for that matter anyone else who cannot read.

According to the Department of Census and Statistics in their special, Millennium Development Goals survey, the literacy rate is 95.8% in the 15-24 age range, who can read and write fluently or read fluently and write with some difficulty. In its own census in 2001 it measured this group to be only 19% of the total population. What about the other 81%? No indication is given as to how literacy was measured or tested, or what fluency means. However, speak to many teachers in the not so popular schools and most will assail you with anecdotal evidence of students who have slipped through the literacy net. Many just dropped out and the 8% who do just that, often have very poor reading and writing skills. Prison chiefs know all too well that a sizeable number of the inmates have little or no functional literacy. There are no government reading tests in schools unlike in many developed countries where a child’s reading age is tested annually, and remedial action taken if reading age falls well below chronological age.

A presentation in 1995 by Chandra Gunawardena of the Open University stated that many official statistics are optimistic and data often relies on self-declaration or overly simplified tests. The survey was interesting because respondents were asked about their claimed literacy rate and were tested for actual literacy. There was a disparity of almost 25% between the two. If a school principal is asked to quantify the number of students who have very poor skills in reading and writing, from which grade does he start. Given the nature of schools, it is unlikely that he or she would even know, and few teachers want to admit they have failed to educate their students. The literacy rate is very good in Sri Lanka and a majority of those above school age do have basic literacy, but it cannot be compared with many developed countries where a person with the educational level of a 10 year old is considered illiterate.

It must be obvious that there are different levels of literacy:

In 2004 20% of school candidates who sat for the O level examination either failed all subjects or passed (narrowly) in one. The figure for all candidates was 28%.. Almost 25% of candidates fail the Sinhala or Tamil examination and a significant additional number obtain the lowest mark, If the 8% school dropouts or no-show students were included those percentages would be even higher. Maths results are somewhat similar. Are these "failures" included in the literacy figures?

A recent editorial in a daily paper, using statistics from a survey by the National Education Commission, stated that;

"Over 57 per cent of [GCE O/L] candidates have failed Mathematics with 51.65 per cent and 63.18 per cent of students crashing in Science and English respectively. Most of those who have passed the examination, it is said, have benefited from the kana shot answers or blind guesses in the MCQ papers!"

In 40 Pirivena schools virtually no student passes the examination, which certainly does not bode well for the young monks attending these institutes. Just a short while ago, the NEC conducted a survey including 4054 students from 70 schools, representing all Provinces (not North and East). It found that 18% of sixth graders could not write at all and that 28% of tenth graders could not write legibly and only 35% could take down a short passage dictated to them. They stated that only 41% were performing at a satisfactory level. Many might say that school is where they teach but tuition centres are where students learn.

Literacy must ensure far more than the simple ability to read a basic text and to be able to copy write from a blackboard or a book. There are many bright first and second graders that have those skills, but can hardly be labelled as literate. Modern literacy is not just the 3Rs [reading, writing, (a)rithmetic]. It should include skills that are becoming essential in our third millennium world, including those that guarantee real democracy.