By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

Trump’s global tariff turmoil has produced more than a ripple of political success for the NPP government in Sri Lanka. The government has been congratulated across the political spectrum for pulling off a competitively favourable tariff arrangement with the United States. Apart from the nakedly tongue-in-cheek calls for more transparency, no one is questioning the accomplished success of the government on the Trump-Tariff file. Everyone involved would seem to have played their part quietly and competently. No one has sought out individual publicity with claims to Einsteinian brilliance in economics as it used to be with a certain Central Bank Governor in the not too distant and inglorious past.

Such acknowledgment of government success is a rare experience for the still fledgling NPP government. Usually, the NPP’s critics outside parliament have been unsparing, and quite out of proportion to the government’s massive majority in parliament. Extra parliamentary criticisms range from supercilious cynicism on the right, radical sermonizing from the left, and everything in between.

Those on the left have been going on ad nauseum about the government’s alleged capitulation to the IMF’s prescriptions for restoring economic performance as part of the arrangement for repaying the country’s debt. Intriguingly, no one from the left would seem to have suggested that the NPP government should reject Trump’s tariff impositions and chart an alternative economic path for Sri Lanka that does not depend on exporting garments to the US. The genius of Trump’s tariff politics is that it has driven everyone to be wholly practical and not at all ideological. Make the best of a bad situation with a volatile US president rather than pick a fight for the global south against a vile hegemon of the north.

Only former interim President Ranil Wickremesinghe has suggested that the NPP government should have made a legal argument against Trump’s tariff measures apparently based on the mutual obligations of Sri Lanka and the US under the IMF’s debt restructuring arrangement. This is fanciful illusion considering Trump’s selective violation of the trilateral free trade agreement between Canada, Mexico and the US that Trump himself had signed on to during his first term. Not to mention Trump’s tariff tantrums against India that are objectively pushing India into reaffirming its alliance with Russia and to look for better relationships with China.

Reform Critics

As opposed to those on the political left, critics on the right are managing to find their fodder in the spate of reforms that the NPP government has started rolling out in different areas, especially in the complicated electricity sector and in the far more politically sensitive field of education. While electricity reform changes have been controversial in limited circles of interest, education touches too many people and there are too many publics who want to have a say in the changes to the educational system.

Although for practical purposes Trump’s tariffs and sectoral reforms are handled in separate compartments, there is much overlapping between them. The cost of electricity along with that of labour are considered to be the two main cost items that render Sri Lanka’s exports less competitive among its competitors. The higher cost of labour could be justified insofar as it produces socially progressive benefits. But there is no reason whatever to delay reducing the cost of electricity in industrial production.

More so when the high electricity cost is universally attributed to the institutional inertia and corruption of the CEB and its not so hidden ties to the Diesel Mafia that has a vested interest against expanding renewable sources of electricity production. It should not be surprising if someone in this mafia world were to come up with the proposition that Sri Lanka should take advantage of Trump’s primeval opposition to wind and solar energy and plead for favoured treatment of Sri Lanka’s exports based on the country’s continuing reliance on environmentally unsustainable thermal sources powering industrial production.

Such a proposition would be perverse in the extreme and hopefully will not find any resonance in any section of the NPP government. Besides, it would also run afoul of other importing countries, especially those in the European Union. The overall point here is that the government should stay focused on electricity reform and make good progress for all the good reasons, including the specific purpose of reducing the cost of electricity in the production of exports.

NPP and Education

There is no immediately direct nexus between education and exports, but the relationship between education and the economy is multifaceted even as it is variously interpreted and misinterpreted. There have been plenty of comments and criticisms after Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya in her dual capacity as Minister of Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education, announced the government’s reform proposals at the beginning of March this year.

Three themes have commonly featured in the public responses: lack of transparency and the need for public consultation; concern over syllabus changes including the apparent devaluing of subjects such as history and performing arts; and the fashioning of education to meet the needs of the economy and prepare recruits for the job market. A related theme has been the need to engage business leaders in consultations over educational reforms.

The media furore over the government’s educational reforms even forced the government to postpone the scheduled Second Reading on the Electricity (Amendment) Bill and allot that time in parliament for a debate on the New Education Reforms. President Dissanayake personally intervened in the debate not only to calm the political waters but also to make statement of serious presidential purchase on the significance of reforming the educational system and the importance that the government attaches to it.

Anyone who listened to President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s homecoming speech at his old Central College in Thambuththegama sometime ago, as part of his campaign to announce that the NPP was ready for government, would appreciate the man’s experiential passion and commitment to uplift the country’s educational system where upliftment is most needed. That is in much of the island’s hinterland which is virtually all of Sri Lanka save for the urban pockets mostly in in Galle, Jaffna and Kandy.

Pair that with the educational and academic background of Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya, and you will find it hard to think of a similarly high-powered pairing in governments past that was similarly committed to educational reform like President AKD and Prime Minister Harini. And that goes all the way to the 1943 free education reform and every reform attempt since including measures that were more disruptive than reformative such as the schools takeover in the 1960s and the standardization scheme for university admissions in the 1970s.

The former was pure political pettiness while the latter was a classic case of violating a great guiderail in public policy, namely, using public policy or reform for the purpose of enhancing the welfare of many without diminishing the welfare of any. A principle that stems from the so called condition of optimality formulated by the great Italian sociologist and polymath Vilfredo Pareto. The implementation of standardization in Sri Lanka affirmatively benefited a large number of students by giving them university admissions, but it should not have and need not have come at the expense of primarily Tamil medium students who were gaining university admission based on merit.

Their merit based success was not the result of parental income, property or wealth but the product of a social system that, bereft of resource endowments and economic opportunities, placed a painstaking premium on education and supported it by well run schools, well respected teachers and a student ethos of spartan hard work. The unintended consequences of standardization are well known and have been tragically experienced. Cleaning up that legacy is also among the tasks facing the NPP government. Reforming the education system is one among many reform tasks that the NPP government is now expected to carry out.   

In her March announcement, the Prime Minister identified five pillars on which the education reform proposals will be based and implemented, viz., the introduction of a new syllabus, development of human resources, development of infrastructure, a public education about education, and the evaluation and assessment of reform outcomes. While the Prime Minister and government spokespersons later on, including President Dissanayake, have spoken about the timeline for syllabus changes (i.e., starting with syllabus reform in 2026 for first to sixth graders), there has been no indication of the timing for infrastructure improvements in either human resources or physical resources.

Syllabus changes will invariably take time as they must. There should also be flexibility in the approach to identify and correct unintended consequences as syllabus changes are implemented. The effects of these changes will also be felt over the medium to long term rather than the short term that will correspond to the next election cycle. On the other hand, making swift progress in improving the processes and physical infrastructure in the educational system would be politically more visible and electorally rewarding.

Politically and electorally, it would be smart for the government to divide its efforts along two pathways. One, the more long term approach to changes in school curriculum and correspondingly at the university level. Two, highly focussed efforts for achieving short term goals that should include implementing new school buildings and improved maintenance, expanding school admissions by location and ending the mad scramble that parents now go through to find school placement for their children, and streamlining the public exam system to end delays especially between the A’Level exams and university admissions.

The gap between exams and admissions began during the tumults of the JVP’s second insurrection, and has been widening ever since. It is now up to the NPP government to close that gap once and for all. If the government could achieve these short term measures before the next cycle of elections, it would have earned itself a remarkable justification for re-election.

There has been much discussion about the role of education in economic development and specifically about refashioning the education system to produce graduates to suit the job market. But there has been little discussion about the mutual roles of the public and the private schools in the educational system. Thankfully, there are no libertarians calling for unbundling education, even though the creation of private schools after 1977 was a rather cavalier form of unbundling.

Blaming the educational system for not producing graduates to match job market requirements is as old as public education itself. The criticism also gets it backwards for the failure is really with the economy in not creating enough jobs across the economic spectrum to absorb the army of students leaving schools and universities at different levels. This was indeed the central point in Dr. NM Perera’s 1944 classic, ‘The Case for Free Education’, where he argued that for free education to be successful the economy should expand in parallel creating jobs for school leavers at multiple levels.

It is not the fault of the public education system that students are gravitating towards streams that will lead them to medical, legal, engineering or accounting professions. Rather it is the failure of the economy to have opportunities for students completing the O’Level or A’Level classes but not getting admission to universities. And why only pick on the public school system? Are the private schools preparing students for non-professional jobs – vocational or not?

It is an old truism that students in the Arts stream do not get job specific training but do have their minds trained to adapt to a range of job demands. Those who majored in classics, modern languages or even history, were not trained in public administration but turned out to be brilliant civil servants. The same goes for law and science stream students. Lawyers do not receive medical training or lessons in accounting in law school to cross examine doctors and accountants. If at all, it is the doctors and accountants who get training in forensic medicine or accounting.

Specific to industrial jobs, I have it on the good authority of former Hayleys Chairman, Mr. NG Wickremeratne, that GCE OL/AL science students are quite capable of adapting to any industrial job requirement in Sri Lanka. Specific job training across the board occurs on the job for new recruits following a general or professional education.  All in all, there is too much hype about the alleged failure of the educational system to feed the economy and too little talk about the real failure of the economy to grow to its full potential and create placements for the products of the educational system.

At the same time, there is no question that the country’s educational system must be placed on a platform for continuous change in keeping with the sweeping changes in technology that have become a fact of life in this Digital Age, or the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The changes must be both in the content of education as well as in the method of imparting it.

Even by fits and starts, Sri Lanka has made impressive strides to keep step with changes in technology. The biggest shortcoming is in the availability of and access to all resources of technology uniformly across the schools throughout the island. The more advanced schools obviously have the greater availability of and access to digital technology than those that lag behind. The task of the government and its reform launch must be to narrow this gap. Doing so in the short term will also assure the NPP of electoral rewards.