Courts doing education policy?

Sri Lanka Education Forum > Blog > General

Posted on August 1, 2007 / 2 Comments

With nobody taking responsibility for anything, the Chief Justice and his team seem to be formulating policy at a rate. The latest is the formula recommended by the courts for Grade 1-admissions.

The Courts ruled sometime back that the admission criteria are unconstitutional. Guarding the constitutions is their business. Good job, hats off. What did the ministry and the officials do with the decision? They waited for somebody to tell them what to do next and the good justices had to stop everything and decide 50% for that and 10% for that etc.

Take the fifty 50% allotment for merit and challenge. What exactly should a five year old do to demonstrate he/she has more merit than the 100 others who are considered for same slot? Is counting to 1000 enough. how much cuteness is required?

What are we doing to our children!!

We have private tuition classes for A/L, classes for O/L, classes for Grade 5 and now we may get tuition classes for Grade 1. Existing pre-schools can expand the curriculum. If the average kid can count to 10 why not get your class counting to 1000? Loading your kids with facts now can begin as early as you want. Why wait till pre-school?

Perhaps the courts should have scolded the minister and the officials and threatened to put them in jail if they donâ€™t deliver, without trying to do the job themselves.

2 Comments

Duminda Disanayake
August 1, 2007, 11:33 am
- Reply
A child goes to schools to learn. Learning to count or read/write are NOT prerequisites for entering year one. In fact, a child is supposed to learn these things at school, not before.

So checking the intelligence/aptitude of a child at the age of 5 years and decide his entire future based on that is not only unreasonable and illogical but even unfair.

As the writer says this will eventually result in parents trying to spoon feed as much as information to their kids tiny brains from the date of birth. How much information the brain of a 5 year old can retain (and reproduce at will)

IQ tests at younger ages have shown they are very unreliable. Repetition of such tests has shown the result deviate from each other within large range.

Testing IQ of a 5 year old is not sometime an educationalist or even a primary school teacher would recommend. If any educationalist recommends such tests their IQ should be tested before testing the IQ of children.
Kulendra
August 1, 2007, 12:25 pm
- Reply
@Duminda : Well said.

And I have absolutely no idea what they try to achieve by this. I mean were they thinking of rounding up the brainier ones to one school? Duh. In my personal opinion, this is just another point where Chief Justice believes he has the right to ‘mould’ the country.

Open Question: Theoretically speaking, what’s the procedure to change the circular? (Or is it still just a reccommendation?)