The Creative Destruction Of ‘Closed-Shops’ Of Free Education   

By Harshana Rajakaruna –DECEMBER 1, 2020

Dr. Harshana Rajakaruna

Education has a crucial role in advancing the values of justice, democratic life, and their broader dissemination in society. Although meant to deliver “free education for all,” Sri Lanka’s government’s schools structure functions as a filter for certain social classes and an engraver of tribalistic attitudes into youth’s minds. An unwarranted scheme is schools’ admissions that deter access for all social strata to equally standard education. Unlike in the West, the standards among our schools drastically differ. Thus, an apparent uncontested reality is, the ‘bigger’ a school, the more affluent its parent bodies and alumni associations are. The ‘bigger,’ meaning the popularity in the society, is the school’s ‘superiority’ as a measure of acceptance of its labeled-products by higher and professional societies in the country as fit to their respective classes and value systems. 

How does a school maintain its superiority in a community of mixed social classes when the distance-to-school from home is the key criterion for selection as the rule of law? The superior schools voluntarily break the law by gatekeeping admissions as ‘closed-shops’ for kids from lower-middle and working-class families. This is done by letting institutionalized, systematic hacking of the admission process by the ‘abled-classes’ filtering out the ‘non-ables.’ These able are the socially connected people from the middle and upper classes. In such a way, the kids recruited to superior schools through hacked admissions ensure that their background and the bearing are ready to take up the membership handed over to them by the upper-class shopkeepers. Selecting the right raw-material in such recruitment makes it easy for the schools to keep their products not finishing up in ‘inferior’ vocations for the shopkeepers’ standard-maintenance. In such a way, the superior schools’ class-consciousness is fed into cycles of generations of recruitment, unchallenged, impeding the poor’s social mobility, denying them access to high-standard education needed to climb up the social ladder. Although a people-powered socialist system, our “free education” in superior schools is not apparently meant for the working and lower-middle classes. How socially just the government lets the ‘able’ in society piggyback the ‘free education’ at the expense of the marginalized and the poor while amassing all other benefits from their wealthy alumni and parental associations? 

It is not merely hypothetical, but witnessing the truth, on the outset are the kids wearing sleepers and ragged clothes, carrying school books in ‘siri bags’ in mediocre schools. Whereas in superior ones, kids wear designer shoes and carry books in designer backpacks. They all attend schools in the neighborhood on the same ‘government-funded’ schools network, sharing the same fences often, thus witnessing the impossibility if the schools’ selection criteria were anything other than poverty. It was not shocking that there were 5000 human rights violation complaints filed in 2018 against school selection boards at primary school admissions. 

The poor have no strength to form a formidable force to reckon with, to fight back the social injustice imposed upon them by the upper classes. Here, I suggest a democratic structural intervention in the school system to bring fairness to all people.

A model in place for herding poor kids to mediocre schools

Currently, herding the marginalized kids into lower-grade schools is mechanized through a system of geographical-placing of lower-grade schools among the superior ones (see Appendix.) For example, popular boys’ and girls’ national schools, called ‘colleges’ or ‘vidyalayas,’ in any big city, are often placed neighboring the lower-grade ones, predominantly mixed-gender. Such schools’ placement conveniently accommodates the ‘left-over’ kids of marginalized families, failed admissions at superior schools, herded into the neighboring mediocre ones functioning as “dump yards,” or ‘a- place-to-go’ for the poor. Interestingly, superior schools, which are single-gender, either boys or girls, have these neighborhood ‘drop-boxes,’ the mediocre ones, mixed-gender, to naturally direct the poor. Such makes the hacked favored admissions by discriminatory gatekeeping, conveniently unchallenged by the failed poor masses. Despite the low standards of education that mediocre schools have to offer, the poor receive the promised “free education,” authenticating the notion.   

Superiority creates tribalism

The kids recruited to superior schools by the social class also set the foundation for the schools to engrave their respective ideologies into kids’ minds, in identifying themselves with schools’ strong beliefs and values, unquestioning their polarities, as “the most superior.” Kids living in a long psychological association with such a school’s ideology naturally get drilled in by which. In such conformist confinements, a closed-community brought up with limited exposure to other societies makes factory-produced minds, resonating despicable tribalism of being “us” being separated from “them.” Such social anti-progressions can damage democratic values in a diversely cultural company concerning people’s approval of people outside of their social circles. The extent to which some look down upon the inadequate or impoverished schools in the neighborhoods as ‘worthless’ makes some poor kids’ sir’ their neighboring fellow students, not out of mutual respect, but to show subordination in class-consciousness, despite all of them receive equally ‘free’ government-funded education. 

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