In his latest contribution to the current discourse on education, my friend Somapala Gunadheera (SG) has drawn attention to the urgent need for a national education policy (The Island 30/10/09). He has quite rightly referred to the failure of those responsible for education to discharge their prime duty of formulating such a policy and has made particular reference to the Ministry of Education (ME) and the National Education Commission (NEC) as the main culprits.

I have been flogging this horse to the point of near exhaustion starting with the article I wrote to The Island a decade ago (October 17, 1999). I have done so in the interest of the younger generation at heart, with no malice to the persons (some of whom are my friends) who have been holding responsible positions in these organizations. I am therefore happy that this year’s Kannangara commemoration activities have helped to focus attention on the dire need to formulate a national education policy at least at this late stage, as we are running the risk of becoming the laggards in our own region where we used to be held as the model for others to follow. With more and more people joining in the attempt to wake up these sleeping giants (NEC, ME et al) and their political masters, let us hope that something good will come out of this present discourse for which The Island editor deserves a great deal of credit for providing space in his newspaper.

A ‘national education policy’, if it is to be truly national, has to be built on some sort of consensus across the political divide on, at least, its key components to ensure that it does not change with every change of government or administration. It took two youth insurrections for us to realize this! The Youth Commission (YC) appointed by President Premadasa in 1989 to "examine the causes of youth discontent, disquiet and unrest" underlined the need to have national policies in areas that transcended party politics. A national policy, the Commission explained, "is not an inflexible policy, but one which will be liable to necessary alteration as changed circumstances may require, and as determined through national consensus, but not a policy to be affected by the vagaries of transient political majorities."

The YC not only identified education as the most important among these areas, but also recommended "the establishment of a National Commission on Education Policy which would aim at achieving a national consensus with regard to educational policy". Reacting positively to this recommendation, the government of the day placed before Parliament a bill for establishing a National Education Commission vested with powers to formulate a national education policy.

Education Minister Lalith Athulathmudali who steered the bill through Parliament described it as "one of the most important bills in the history of education in this country" and went on to describe the proposed Commission as the instrument by which "stability could be restored to the education system". The bill received the support of all parties represented in Parliament, and became law as the National Education Commission Act No. 19 of 1991. Shortly thereafter, a National Education Commission was set up with the chairman of the Youth Commission himself as its chairman, and one of its leading members as a member.

The NEC Act took away the policy formulation function that the Ministry of Education had hitherto enjoyed and vested it in the NEC, a permanent Presidential Commission directly answerable to the President. While this did not mean that the Ministry had no input to make to policy formulation or take day-to-day policy decisions at the micro-level, it was a clear recognition of the need to depoliticize policy-making in education so that the long or medium term objectives are not sacrificed at the altar of partisan political priorities of the moment. It is in recognition of this need that the Government of the day saw to it that the persons appointed as members of the Commission including its Chairman were a-political, and were appointed with the concurrence of the Opposition. Everyone welcomed this as a happy augury for the task of developing a national education policy in this country!

Section 8 (1) of the NEC Act required the Commission to make recommendations to the President on "education policy in all its aspects with a view to ensuring continuity in educational policy and enabling the education system to respond to changing needs in society". The National Education Policy (note the capital letters) had to be declared by the President under section 2 (1) of the Act taking into consideration these recommendations; and once the President makes such a declaration, all authorities and institutions responsible for education were required to conform to it. Thus we see the words National Education Policy (NEP) acquiring a specific legal meaning under the NEC Act. Section 2(2) went to the extent of listing some of the things that the NEP should deal with such as the structure of the educational system; the establishment, location and distribution of educational institutions, including methods and criteria for admission of students and recruitment of teachers; the content of education including the medium of instruction and so on.

I have dealt with the record of the NEC in regard to the task entrusted to it in considerable detail elsewhere, and do not wish to take valuable space here to repeat what I have said (see my JEJ Memorial Lecture delivered at the SLFI on February 14, 2003 carried in full in The Island of February 17/18, 2003). The sad story is that we have yet to see a NEP as envisaged by Parliament when it gave its unanimous approval for setting up the NEC, way back in 1991. In the absence of such a policy, we see policy decisions in education being made and unmade in gay abandon by those holding office at a given moment, and education going from crisis to crisis.

The nearest we got to formulating a NEP was the document entitled ‘Proposals for a National Policy Framework on General Education in Sri Lanka, December 2003’ submitted to the then President (appointing authority) by the NEC in January 2004. Although it covered only general education and proposals on other areas were expected to follow, it marked a good beginning giving us fresh hope that something meaningful was happening. One of the first things that President CBK did after the General Elections of March 2004, however, was to send the Chairman and Vice-Chairperson of the NEC home, as the reward for the hard work they had put in for a period of over two years to prepare the above Proposals! Worse still, she took the unpardonable step of politicizing the NEC with the new appointments she made, rocking the very foundation on which the NEC was established in 1991. Apparently she was unhappy that the NEC document contained a review of the 1997 Reforms introduced under her stewardship, and proposed some changes based on field-level evaluations and in –depth studies done by specially selected consultants, under World Bank funding!

It appears that the NEC has become non est since then as far as the formulation of a NEP is concerned, and it is time they informed the public (who are their ultimate pay-masters) as to their present pre-occupations!

The plan of action that SG has placed before us as a way of making amends for "the blindness of the ME" and "the paralysis of the NEC" is for the OPA to intervene and do the following:

(i) Convene a meeting of committed experts for the purpose of brainstorming proposals to charter the course of education,

(ii) A recognized national expert with extensive and intensive experience to make the keynote address,

(iii) The brainstorming session to appoint a committee of experts to draft a set of proposals that would in effect constitute the desired reforms,

(iv) These proposals to be submitted to the brainstorming body for review and finalization,

(v) A committee with an executive bias as well as political clout to be thereafter entrusted with the task of implementing it on a time frame

With due respect to my friend SG and the OPA, I do not think the outcome of the above exercise will constitute the National Education Policy of this country while, of course, conceding that it will be a valuable input to such a policy. What we need, instead, is the political will at the highest level to set things right at the NEC and put it on track to deliver what it was set up for, within a given time-frame. The OPA can add its collective weight to individual attempts like those of mine which have hitherto brought no result!