When Talent is Everywhere but Opportunity is Not
By: Renushi Ubeyratna
Tags: Sri Lanka, Personal Reflection, Opportunity, Education Reform, Learning And Development

I’ve lived enough to know that the most pivotal turning-points in life are the type that hits us like a ton of bricks and profoundly changes how we come to understand the world and its complexities. These turning-points have a curious and transformative power. Mine might be just as unremarkable as the next one — but here’s the catch. The stories that follow them, contain multitudes. They inform our narratives, disrupt old ways of thinking, and the work we set out to do.

I’ll cut to the chase. By force of “circumstance,” my suburban, lower-middle-class upbringing meant that my formative years were shaped by a primary and secondary education at a low-end semi-government Catholic school in Colombo. Along with the ABCs, trigonometry, and a carefully curated syllabus of Sri Lanka’s history, we were also taught the clichéd adage of “respect and obey your elders,” (more on the implications of unconditional compliance later), that “boys will be boys,” and that any attempt at dissent will send one straight to the principal’s office.

I like to think the universe conspired to save my naïve, uninformed self by landing me a place at what is generally regarded as one of Colombo’s elite private girls’ schools — where having alumni who were trailblazers and thought leaders in their fields and graduates who made their way straight into Oxford, was… normal and not a grand exception to the status quo. At this school, I learned that god-emperor Augustus was kind of a big deal back in the day, that French cognates are not as easy as one would think, and that Enid Blyton isn’t rea...ally a best-loved author. That wasn’t all. Apparently, having a boyfriend at sixteen was not a crime, and that disagreeing with your teacher was possible, welcomed and not to be regarded as the end of the world.

By the time I completed A/Ls, I had already begun to refuse to see and consume information and mainstream opinions at face level. But the creeping tendency to question quite literally everything and upend comfortable worldviews was instilled at university. Between adjusting to — an elite, private school culture, having come from a lower-middle-class background, to re-adjusting to an entirely different climate at a state-funded public university — my private school guilt took root. It was the realization that these turning points placed me at a unique juncture; the ability to have a versatile perspective informed by uncomfortable realities and complex social intersections, minus the fluff.

The phrase “private school guilt” can be understood in many ways, depending on how one looks at it. To me, it meant that a student with a proficiency in English and an education from a high-end, “respectable” school, usually in the more urbanized districts of Sri Lanka — is likely to have an immediate advantage over their peers. This is a reality that is informed by many intersections, including class, language, culture and religion.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

What follows are a few observations about what my lower-middle-class upbringing and private school guilt taught me about Sri Lanka’s education deficit. This list is not exhaustive: many more nuanced analyses exist, for example regarding colonial legacies and bad governance.

#1 The trouble with academic elitism

Being able to attend a “respectable” or “prestigious” school in the more urbanized districts of Colombo, Galle or Kandy, mattered. It is also one that is bound to get you up the social ladder, not to mention better university access, well-salaried job prospects and social currency. We pride ourselves as a country that has championed free education for all. This is not synonymous with equal access to *quality* education.

#2 Healthy dissent > Unconditional compliance

Only a handful of schools and universities in Sri Lanka encourage students to step out of line when appropriate. Spirals of silence are not going to save us. And blind obedience will only get you so far. The Sri Lankan education system, right from the primary level, culturally conditions us to comply with a “sir/madam” culture. This promotes subservient attitudes and unconditional compliance.

#3 Memorization ≠ Learning

Why is it that we can still blurt out the phrase “mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell” by heart, but when it comes to understanding what that actually means, we go back to scratching our heads? Our exams are designed to test memory, not thinking or analytical capacities. Teachers who read out notes word-by-word might just be one of many culprits who encourage this culture. On the contrary, I recall how Fridays during A/Ls were allocated for practice sessions that included having to answer one unorthodox question during mock exams. This helped immensely for students to think on their own and break out of the mould of writing conventional answers to predictable questions.

#4 Chastity, abstinence and victim-blaming v. sexuality and consent

I recall this one time when my tenth-grade teacher preached to a class of forty, that a mother who cannot get pregnant means that she has been cursed by God and that men “have needs,” among other questionable remarks. The damage that medically inaccurate and puritan takes on sexuality education can do to students in their most impressionable years is staggering. Amid pushback by religious groups, Sri Lanka is making (albeit slow) progress in establishing the practice of comprehensive sexuality education — a system that instils a life-long process of acquiring information and forming attitudes, beliefs and values about identity, relationships and intimacy.

#5 Bi/tri-lingual speaker > monolingual English speaker

A lack of national effort in education spending continues to widen the resource gap between English-medium and Sinhala/Tamil-medium students. Contrary to popular opinion, being bilingual or trilingual in a country like Sri Lanka is much more beneficial than being a monolingual English speaker. The former would naturally allow us to step outside the comfort of our echo chambers and connect with people and communities outside our own. The stories, opportunities as well as new and unlikely friendships are endless.

#6 Democratizing access to learning English

We have a long way to go in democratizing access to English language skills. The realization that my English-medium peers were naturally at a higher advantage than my Sinhala-medium batchmates, due to an endless availability of resources, both online and offline, was a bitter pill to swallow. While most of them struggled to understand the gist of a single journal article with complex jargon and mostly western anecdotes, the rest of us were already on to the next journal or video tutorial. The playing field was far from equitable. Not all schools in Sri Lanka have English as a medium of instruction and parents from disadvantaged backgrounds often grapple with social pressures to send their children to such schools, because English proficiency = higher career prospects. Even when access to learning English is available, it is often implemented across colonial and elite lines. Take “elocution classes” for instance. The idea of going for classes to soften one’s accent, for example, is just another catalyst for increased inequality and class stigma.

Anyway, to drive my point home, my circumstances profoundly impacted the path I chose to make for myself, to think critically, “unlearn” and be open to endless opportunities. Many students in Sri Lanka consider rote learning and blind obedience as the benchmark of *an education*, glaringly unaware that equal access to a *quality* education is their right and not a privilege. I know, because I was one of them.

Hope springs eternal and let’s hope that we live to see the day where students are not programmed but taught to think and thrive.

Disclaimer

This is a personal essay. Any views or opinions represented are personal and does not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that I may or may not be associated with in a professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated.

Any views or opinions are not intended to malign any single institution, establishment or individual.