PRIZE GIVING 2010
The annual Prize Giving of College was held on the 9th of July 2010 at the College Main Hall. The Chief Guest for the event was distinguished old boy of College and the Group Chief Executive of Dialog Telekom PLC Dr.Hans Wijesooriya and his wife.
A portrait of former Warden of College Dr.David Ponniah was also unveiled by the Bishop of Colombo The Rt. Rev. Duleep Kamil de Chickera.
WARDEN'S REPORT AFTER PICTURE GALLERY
WARDEN'S PRIZE GIVING 2010 SPEECH
My Lord Bishop, distinguished chief guests, members of the board of governors, Dr Ponniah, principals, sub warden, members of the clergy, members of staff, parents, and of course boys: it gives me great pleasure to be able to introduce this, the 2010 Saint Thomas College prize giving. We have as our chief guest today Dr Hans Wijayasuriya and Dr Mrs Leana Wijayasuriya who has done us the honour of flying in from the United Kingdom at considerable personal inconvenience and cost. Dr Wijayasuriya is well known to us both as an old Thomian and also as the chief executive of one of Sri Lanka's top companies, Dialog Telekom. Dr Mrs Leana Wijayasuriya is a consultant paediatrician in Sheffield in the UK.
As I observe in my printed report, although technically tomorrow is the anniversary of my installation, it was on the equivalent Friday last July that I was installed, so today is an opportunity for reflection and evaluation; I can in a sense write my own end-of-year report. I am not going to read what is already printed in the prize booklet. Instead I propose to concentrate on one of the four aspects of the school which I identified as a serious concern last year. I identified four areas that demanded attention: finance; maintenance; administration; and educational standards. We have made major progress on the first three even if much remains to be done, but in many respects that is the easy part. Identifying what it is that prevents the school from being what it should be academically is far more difficult, and finding a path by which to remedy it more difficult still. At the risk of falling foul of Mrs Wijayasuriya's professional expertise, we need to identify the symptoms, diagnose the disease, and prescribe a cure.
I am going to begin by "doing some dirty washing in public". We have a problem, particularly in the College years, with boys not coming to school. But suppose we use absenteeism as a symptom of something rather than as a disease in its own right. It may arise just because boys are being naughty, playing truant, but isn't it much more likely to be because what they find presented to them at school does not engage their interest or, in some cases, is actually just too hard for them to understand? There is little that is more frustrating than sitting in a classroom or a lecture hall listening to a lesson or lecture that makes no sense, which might as well be in a foreign language. And so absenteeism is telling us something about whether boys are engaged by and interested in what we are teaching. And this is particularly true of our A-level students, and my diagnosis is that that in its turn is because for some of them A levels are either not appropriate or just too difficult.
Examination results bear out this conclusion. And we should not be surprised: as an essentially non-selective school we will have boys from most of the ability range, but A levels are designed for high achievers, and Sri Lankan A levels in particular are extremely demanding, certainly far more demanding than their equivalents in England. But most of the boys if you ask them will say that after school they will go on to take some kind of vocational course. So why should they not be given the opportunity to start that course earlier to give themselves some qualifications by the time they leave school and leave A levels to those who need them and can manage them? I see little or no purpose in a boy spending three years studying A levels in which he generally and regularly scores marks below 20 per cent, only to emerge from his schooldays with three F grades at A level. It would be better for him, better for us, and a far better investment for his parents, if we provided him with a different kind of conclusion to his schooldays based upon a more imaginative range of courses of study. In other words, as I say in my printed report, once we take a boy on we honour the responsibility that entails, but that requires us to consider a wider range of educational options than are provided only by O levels and A levels.
So to be true to the principle that we must do the right thing by all the boys we admit within reasonable and achievable limits, my key question today in pursuit of an answer to how to solve our educational issues becomes:
How can a school be strong academically even if many of its pupils are not academically strong?
In part the answer is the quality of the teachers; in part the answer is the quality of the boys it admits, their raw intelligence; in part it is its facilities, its libraries and science and computer laboratories, its musical and artistic studios. But there is one factor missing, and it is decisive: what makes a school a strongly academic school is its academic ethos. If pupils take their study seriously, if there are enough of them for serious-minded education to reach what we might call critical mass, borrowing a term from physics, then not only will the best thrive, but all others too, dragged along in the slip-steam of a general serious-mindedness about study and intellectual excellence.
The presence of boys in the school who are not interested in and engaged by their studies is seriously damaging its educational health; it is preventing us from achieving educational critical mass; it is measurably preventing the vast majority from achieving what they could achieve; and it is forcing the truly exceptional to go out on their own and leave the rest behind because the negative influence of those who are neither interested not committed is destroying the intellectual health of the school. Given that we have admitted them and have a responsibility for them, therefore, we have to solve two problems to overcome this difficulty: how to provide them with another course of study more suited to their needs, interests and abilities; and how to remove them from courses for which they have no aptitude in order to allow an educational critical mass to form which will benefit all those who are serious students with good prospects of success.
In my pursuit of the symptoms of academic excellence and malaise I also need to say a word about learning. I have said this many times before, but by adapting to education the well-worn catch-phrase of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime", we come up with something like this: "Teach a man a fact and you equip him for a quiz; teach a man to think and you equip him for a life". It is far more important to learn how to think than to learn how to remember facts. So true education is not only or even primarily about teaching facts; it is primarily about teaching thinking.
But from my observations of the way the education system works in Sri Lanka, I do find myself wondering whether we are in general altogether comfortable with this distinction. Free thinking often challenges accepted norms and unsettles established practices. As Shakespeare once put it, "Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous" (Julius Caesar, 1.2). Thomians are by and large experts at learning facts and they love quizzes as a result. Some even seem to approach examinations by trying to memorize every model answer to every past question-paper; they think study is about doing endless past papers and memorizing the results. Some have even said that national Sri Lankan educational policy is based upon the principle that what you learn at school one day you regurgitate in an examination hall the next (although a cartoon in a recent edition of The Island illustrates the point far less politely). And does this perhaps explain the extraordinary enthusiasm for tuition classes which are geared exclusively to getting students a good grade in examinations rather than teaching them how to think so that they can pass the great examination of life? Does it perhaps explain why parents are so critical if their children do no return home with pages of notes, because they have not been fed with enough facts that day? Yet is it not an obvious truth that knowing the answers to every examination ever set in the past does not guarantee that you will be able to answer the questions in the paper you will sit in the future unless the examination system itself is designed to reward exactly this kind of parrot-fashion learning, which isn't really learning at all. Real cleverness and intelligence, after all, manifest themselves in the capacity to solve new, hitherto-unknown and unseen problems.
This is particularly clear if we consider the flow of lessons, the connections between lessons, and the tacit dimension of learning, for opportunities to sharpen intelligence are lost if we confuse learning with acquiring mountains of facts: learning allows us to know things we have never been taught; it allows us to interpolate between the things we have experienced to discover solutions to new problems; and much of the stuff of learning comes from the continuity of exposure to discussion of the nature of the subject-matter in daily conversation with teachers and other boys.
What I am arguing here is that education is a team effort, a collective enterprise, in which boys learn from one another as well as from their teachers. Yet too often it becomes an individual matter where pupils see themselves as solitary learners, and so pupils owe it to their classmates to attend school because they all depend on one another for their learning. Attendance is a moral obligation. Of course sport and the committees of clubs and societies provide boys with opportunities to learn how to work in teams, but without co-operative learning, such opportunities are rare in the rest of education. Just when industry and commerce, scientific research and international co-operation are becoming so heavily dependent upon teamwork, traditional education is still tenaciously holding on to an individualistic view of learning and assessment almost completely out of tune with that corporate, co-operative world.
To enable and to motivate children to understand themselves as part of a co-operative society: that is what schools are really for, and there is no better way to teach this inter-dependency than to encourage co-operative, team-based education from an early age. Schools do not exist just to provide qualifications; they are not just to win sports cups and prizes; they are not just to organize societies and clubs. Enabling and motivating young people must always be contextualised by a sense of service, by a sense of humility and by a sense that they are playing just a small part in the life of a great nation and a greater world where people, but for them and others like them, would still be hunting in the dust for grubs and berries. It is easy to forget how much we owe to those who have risen above their circumstances to do something worthwhile with their lives that benefits others. It is easy to think "this is my life and I will do what I like with it", but it is not true, and had there been too many of like mind, none of us would be sitting here enjoying the benefits of their efforts, their generosity, or their wisdom.
Before introducing our chief guests today I would like to take opportunity to thank the countless people who have worked so hard to make this event possible: to those who have prepared the hall and especially Mr Priyalal Fernando and his team; to those who have organized the prize vouchers, cups and certificates, especially Mr Maurice and Mrs Arendtsz; to polishers of cups, arrangers of flowers, players of instruments, arrangers of chairs, printers of labels and painters of walls and no doubt a great many others; to Mr Senadheera for undertaking the marathon of reading all the names of prizewinners, and for everyone desperately trying to make sure that we distribute them in the right order to the right people. For all sorts of things both connected with and disconnected from the prizegiving I would like to add my personal thanks for services to the school that go well beyond the call of duty to the Sub-Warden Mr Harshana Perera and my long-suffering secretary Mrs Nelun Wijesinha without both of whom the school could scarcely function.
But I now turn to our two Chief Guests. In the recent past it has been the custom to invite chief guests to our Prizegiving who have already nearly completed their distinguished academic or commercial careers. It strikes me that to inspire the most able and the high achieving young men of our school we should at least occasionally invite those who are still in the midst of their careers to come and speak to the young men who will shape Sri Lanka's tomorrow, and the field of information technology and communication is increasingly central to all our lives.
I can think of no-one better able to speak from his experience in this exciting and new field of human endeavour, and no living Sri Lankan whose career has been more distinguished in that field than our Chief Guest. He has pioneered the development of innovative communications technology throughout Sri Lanka, and the love-affair Sri Lankans have with their mobile phones, visible everywhere connecting people with one another as never before, is in no small measure something he and his companies have brokered. Communications technology is revolutionizing the world; the boys we have in school today will witness changes we cannot now even imagine; the adventure has only just begun. Providing them with awareness not only of the scientific and environmental but also of the social impact of that technology is a major aspect of contemporary educational obligation. Our chief guest today is much better equipped to talk about that than I am. But even if he is still in the midst of his career, which implies that he still has a great deal more to achieve in the future, and even if that may mean one day that he is invited back to reflect on the totality of that career, or to address us by satellite link from wherever in the world he may then be, he has one great advantage over the rest of us when it comes to realizing that future: he is with Dialog, so he can live his future today.
Madam, we are enormously grateful to you for going to such lengths to be with us to distribute the prizes. And Hanz, we are enormously grateful to you for agreeing to take time out of your extraordinarily busy international schedule to address us today, and it is typical of your great humility that you voiced the preposterous thought that you couldn't imagine what you had done to deserve the invitation. We very much look forward to what you have to say.
ESTO PERPETUA
Rev. John C. Puddefoot
Warden
9th July 2010
