Carmen Wickramagamage
Department of English, University of Peradeniya
The year 1943 saw the most indisputably, socially transformative measure to date being introduced in colonial Ceylon: ‘Free Education,’ from primary school through university. The measure, proposed and pushed through the Legislature by members of the Education Reforms Committee with leadership by C.W.W. Kannangara, was accompanied by another equally radical proposal to replace the earlier two-tiered system of education (offering fee-levying English medium education to the ‘haves’ and free vernacular-medium education to the ‘have-nots’) with compulsory ‘mother-tongue’ instruction to all. Today, there is unanimous agreement that the ‘Free Education Initiative’, introduced to Ceylon on the cusp of independence from Britain, has turned education into the single most important instrument of social justice in post-independence Sri Lanka; freeing individuals from the debilitating impact of ascribed social status, such as caste, class and gender, and instituting a meritocracy of sorts where the deserving individual can move up the social and economic ladder on the basis of merit, irrespective of their ‘inherited disabilities’. However, although ‘gender’ is mentioned as one of the ‘debilitating’ hierarchies made unstable by ‘Free Education’, there is little research to date on how transformative the impact of the ‘Free Education Initiative’ has been on the social, economic and cultural status of Lankan women. The present study, while highlighting the decidedly more marked impact of the ‘Free Education Initiative’ on women than on men, also raises questions regarding what exactly has been its impact on the gendered status-quo in post-independence Sri Lanka. The paper will therefore discuss, on the one hand, available statistics on literacy rates and women’s educational achievements over its 70-year tenure, which attest to the ineluctably positive impact of Free Education on women. The paper will, on the other hand, look at data on women’s participation rates in income-generating employment, their numbers in the upper echelons of the administrative and managerial cadres, the percentages of women in formal electoral politics, the representations of women in mainstream and dominant cultural artefacts, and the ubiquitous phenomenon of violence against girls and women, in order to ask how much the ‘returns to education’ have translated into a higher social and cultural status for Lankan women. The paper can therefore be said to revolve around the question: Has the ‘Free Education Initiative’ been able to live up to its promise in the case of women or is the impact to be seen as ‘equivocal’ at best?
(Presented in the 2013 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum: The Emergence and Heritage of Asian Women Intellectuals, 10-11 September 2013, Imperial Queen’s Park Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Institute of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts and Indian Studies Center, Chulalongkorn University)