Today, Sri Lanka has around 10,300 government schools. The curriculum offered is approved by the Ministry of Education. Schooling is compulsory for children from 5 + to 13 years of age and education is state funded and offered free of charge at all levels, including the university level.
Literacy rates and educational attainment levels rose steadily after Sri Lanka became an independent nation in 1948 and today, youth literacy rate stands at 97%. The Government gives high priority to improving the national education system and access to education.
Our education structure is divided into five parts: primary, junior secondary, senior secondary, collegiate and tertiary. In this short article, we will touch upon Secondary Education with reference to the curriculum.
Junior Secondary
Junior Secondary refers to Grades 6 to 9. It follows a common curriculum comprising twelve subjects viz. Religion, Sinhala/Tamil Language, English, Mathematics, Science, History, Geography, Life Competencies and Citizenship Education, Aesthetic subjects (Music, Art, Dancing, Drama and Theatre), Practical and Technical Skills, Health and Physical Education and Sinhala/Tamil as a second language. The present curriculum is competency based, and the content designed to give competency, and most of the periods are assigned for major subjects.
The need to forge a close link between the school education system and the needs of industry and business in particular has been widely discussed in many recent forums among industry leaders. Many have expressed concerns over the quality of output generated by our educational systems both at secondary and tertiary levels in producing prospective candidates employable in terms of hard and soft skills.
In Sri Lanka the general secondary education seems to have been designed almost exclusively to prepare young people for higher education, though in reality only a very small selection enters the institutions of higher education. On the other hand, technical and vocational education and training at secondary level are seen as the domain of those whose academic capabilities are not adequate for higher education. This is a wrong concept.
It appears that preparing students for academic or professional education at tertiary level is no longer the sole objective of secondary education. Secondary education is expected to serve multiple purposes such as preparing students who enter the world of work either as trainees, wage employees or as self-employed entrepreneurs.
Application in real world
Any good secondary education should achieve its purpose, e.g. training students to draw knowledge from multiple disciplines and apply them in the real world. However, in the Sri Lankan context, the impact is questionable. The typical secondary education program only requires students to take a set of courses, each focusing on a narrowed subject, without any connection to one another. Worse yet, these courses are designed and taught separately by different teachers, who don’t usually work with each other to connect these courses. This type of curriculum lacks coherence.
Why does this incoherence matter?
First, the curriculum program does not show students how to connect knowledge they have learnt in those classes. Second, most students are not trained to apply what they learn to their real life.
Hence, it is a waste of their time and effort. Secondary education is undeniably crucial for educating competent citizens, but if students are required to take those general courses anyway, why not make them more engaging and helpful?
What should be done?
The Government needs to revise the curriculum of secondary grades and develop more interdisciplinary programs to provide students with a broad base of knowledge and the ability to connect multiple disciplines. One way is to focus on decreasing the separation of disciplines. To create a cohesive curriculum, courses should be developed or redesigned to gain connection with other courses.
One approach could be to create skill-based courses that are transferable to many disciplines. For example, knowledge about the scientific research method and logical thinking can be covered by a single course. Knowledge learned from such a course can be applied in almost all natural and social science fields.
For example, the US Secondary Grade curriculum consists of four one-year courses on critical thinking, problem solving, and interpersonal skills.
Each class trains students to adopt a set of skills called Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts (HC). One of the classes teach Empirical Analyses, i.e. problem-solving skills, such as design thinking, and train students to apply such skills to solve many problems.
The curriculum design is then built into upper-level classes based on competencies, thereby connecting the classes together. Their curriculum is described as a systematic rethinking of the liberal arts and has gained attention within the higher education community.
Another approach is to construct courses based on pressing issues such as, sustainable development. In this way, each course or each component of a class can cover a different aspect of a question or issue, helping students to form comprehensive thinking to solve complex problems.
Cooperation
To build a program of significant efficacy, a school must promote and maintain communication and collaboration between members of the school- including students, teachers, and school administration staff- at the highest level. Particularly, students need to have more voice and hold more decision-making power in constructing an interdisciplinary curriculum.
The feedback between students and the school should also be kept at a constant basis, ensuring the curriculum and pedagogues stay adapted to the student’s and the school’s concerns.
In general, although the purpose of the contemporary general education curriculum is indisputable, it has not been properly done in Sri Lanka. Alternative approaches need to be adopted. However, for such complex efforts to be successful, there need to be a well-structured, long-term plan and implementation, and open dialogue among the higher education stakeholders.