From: "Arjuna Ponnambalam" <bingyraj@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 14, 2013 9:27:06 AM
Subject: Fwd: The Story Of Johnians And The Controversial Practice In Our Teaching In Sri Lanka
This
chap’s father was Rasan Hitchcock Canagarajah a teacher. He married a
Cynthia Thevathasan also a teacher at the girls’ school. They had three
boys and a girl. Two boys are now professors at US universities and the
third is with the IMF in Washington. The girl was a teacher at Methodist
College, Colombo and died a few years back of Dengue fever. This boy
is the eldest child.
Nice speech. Enjoy.
Subject: The Story Of Johnians And The Controversial Practice In Our Teaching In Sri Lanka
The Story Of Johnians And The Controversial Practice In Our Teaching In Sri Lanka
By Suresh Canagarajah -
It
is a pleasure to be back in my alma mater on its 190th anniversary. All
old boys will agree that we owe a lot to St John’s College for all that
we have achieved here in Sri Lanka and abroad in our personal and
professional lives. I want to start with two brief stories to
demonstrate how the foundation provided by St John’s has helped me in my
academic career. I hope that these stories show our students how a
strong and meaningful early education is important for our success.
When I went to the US for graduate education from University of Jaffna,
I was worried that the knowledge there would be so advanced that I
won’t be able to follow the courses. For one particular course, I
thought I should talk to the professor before the class to see if he
would recommend that I delay following that course. Professor John Baugh
spoke with me for about ten minutes and asked me what books I had read
in my field and which scholars I knew. Half way through the
conversation, his eyes widened, and he said, “Do you realize that you
are one of the most widely read students in this department? You
obviously have good reading skills and academic training. Where did you
get this educational foundation?”
My
mind immediately went to my training at St John’s. From my early grades
here, St John’s has always reserved time for the library. Students were
taken to the Handy Library for a whole class period, to learn how to
search for books, get familiar with the cataloguing system, and read
quietly without talking to others in the silence of the library. That
experience trained me in many things. It developed an appreciation for
books, it disciplined me to focus on the reading, and it inculcated
patience to read without distractions. It is this training that helped
me to cultivate my reading habit. When I went to the US, I found that I
was not only ready for my graduate education, I could also overcome the
new academic challenges I faced there because of the reading skills St
John’s had developed in me.
My
second story relates to the skills of public speaking and memory. The
college has always reserved time for literary associations, speech
competitions, and concerts. Particularly challenging to me was the Tamil
Oratory competition in upper school. We were provided a choice of
topics, given a few hours to prepare, and then expected to stand before
three judges and the audience to deliver the speech. This competition
required good skills of thinking, planning, memory, and spontaneous
delivery. This is because the time given was not enough to write a whole
speech and read it. The skills I developed from this experience still
remain with me. I still prepare the outline of my talk mentally,
organize the points effectively, and speak without writing down the
whole speech. This skill sometimes surprises my listeners. Recently, a
senior professor from the US took me aside after I gave the keynote in a
major professional conference and whispered: “That was a great talk.
But tell me the truth: you wrote the talk and then memorized it, right?”
She was surprised by my memory (that I can speak for an hour without
notes), organization skills (that the talk was still very coherent), and
delivery (that it was done with confidence). I had to explain that the
talk wasn’t written or memorized. I had developed all the skills she
mentioned during my early education at St John’s.
What
is interesting about both examples is that these skills of reading,
speaking, thinking, and planning cannot be developed on a single day or
in a short time. You can’t develop them simply before an examination or a
lecture. They take time to develop. It is for this reason that a solid
educational foundation is important. The habits and practices we develop
in childhood support us in the challenges we face later in life. They
develop further and help us achieve even more complex and demanding
tasks. Many scholars think that some of these skills are dying today.
Young people are losing the discipline of reading consistently for a
long period of time because technology offers them instant and
disconnected messages from multiple media. Memory is impoverished as
students depend on readymade sources for information and are not
expected to remember them for future use. I would suggest that the
skills St John’s developed in me are still valuable and have helped
countless former students succeed in their education and professions.
These
skills are part of the tradition of St John’s. From its very beginning,
the college has given a high place for these skills. The first school
library association was started in 1890. There are other Johnian
traditions everyone in Jaffna and even in Sri Lanka talks about. The
college is well known for developing a solid background in English,
cultivating a good discipline, and providing a balanced education that
includes spirituality, sports, and extracurricular activities. However,
we cannot remain satisfied with these traditions. When we have profound
social changes around us, both locally and globally, we have to
reconsider what new traditions we have to develop to serve our students
and communities better. So, I want to focus in this talk on five changes
we need in education to respond to the changes around us. To make it
easier for students to remember them, each of the changes I propose
starts with the letter C. Let me see if you can remember them after this
talk!
The
first change to consider is orientating to learning as creative. We
have to focus on creating new knowledge rather than repeating old
knowledge. There has been an observation that while western communities
are good in inventing new things, eastern communities are good in
applying and implementing them. Is there something in the culture of the
western people that values novelty, while eastern people value
tradition and orthodoxy? This attitude to knowledge could also be
because we in Asia give so much importance to examinations, which
cultivate a focus on established knowledge and the ability to repeat it.
However, learning involves more than passing an examination. Our
students have to also produce new findings, discover new knowledge, and
invent new technology. If not, we will always be followers of other
communities rather than leaders. We will also not be able to develop our
own communities in the ways that are relevant for us.
Consider
how students are encouraged to be creative in the United States. Every
year, there are nationwide science competitions for school students to
display their new inventions. One of the winners in this year’s
competition was Eesha Khare from California, whose parents come from
India. She produced a supercapacitator, a gadget that will fully charge
cell phones in 20 seconds, in extremely short time. She won a prize of
50,000 dollars, which she is going to use to attend Harvard. These
inventions are not playful. They actually lead to industrial production
and make real changes in people’s lives. Eesha is already courted by
major high tech companies. They say “Necessity is the mother of
invention.” In our community now, we have a lot of need. We have
experienced a lot of destruction during the war. You can invent things
that make a difference in the lives of our people.
Change
number two: learning should be critical. By critical, I mean that we
should have a questioning attitude towards knowledge and facts. This is
connected to the previous change. We cannot be creative without
questioning old knowledge. Asian communities don’t always encourage a
questioning attitude because they believe that authorities such as
parents, teachers, and leaders know what is right for everyone.
Questioning is discouraged because it is considered a challenge to those
in authority. I think the tragedies of our community in our recent
history have resulted from our inability to question our leaders.
Eventually, such an unquestioning attitude led to destructive policies
and actions.
However,
questioning doesn’t mean rejecting everything that our community holds
as important. A critical learning can actually help us understand and
appreciate our traditions and values. It can also help us understand our
limitations and work towards formulating new values and traditions.
Questioning can start from what goes in our schools and go all the way
to what goes in our country and even in the world. Consider how students
in a school in the United States, Wilcox County High School in Georgia,
engaged in critical thinking. Their school had a tradition of holding
two year-end parties—one for white students, the other for colored
students. This April, some students thought this tradition was flawed.
They wanted to establish a new tradition in which students from all the
races can have one unified party. A group of four students from
different racial backgrounds organized a committee to plan this party.
There was considerable opposition from their town. There was talk that
these students will be punished or ostracized. However, these students
didn’t give up. Eventually, when they held a successful party for all
the racial groups, their story was in the national news media. They were
applauded by the whole country for inventing a new tradition for their
school.
Change
number three: learning as civic. Civic means relating to the community
we live in and being good citizens. Do we see our learning connected to
making a better living condition for our community? Or do we engage only
in learning for the sake of learning? If our only objective in going to
school is to get all A’s in the AL examinations, learning is not civic.
It is selfish. Our competitive examinations have made us focus only on
displaying our own mastery of knowledge, rather than considering how
this knowledge can be used in the service of our community. The civic
attitude can enhance learning rather than distracting students from
education.
Consider
the example of civic learning from a school in the United States. In
the city of Madison some years back, teachers in a high school divided
their students into small groups and gave them projects relating to some
burning issues in their community. Students had to study the problem
and write a report on how to solve it. One group focused on the
increasing rates of asthma in their town. The four students divided the
responsibilities among themselves. One student visited local communities
and talked to parents and leaders about their view that pollution was
causing asthma. Another student interviewed the municipal authorities in
the town on sanitary conditions. The third student did library research
on news reports and scholarly research on the connection between asthma
and environmental pollution. The fourth student interviewed scientists
in the local university to understand how pollution caused asthma. As
they conducted this project, the students were sharpening their learning
skills—they were reading advanced research and news material; they were
developing interviewing skills; they were writing reports on what they
observed and learned. Their motivation to solve the problem in their
community made all this learning interesting and engaging. Eventually,
they wrote a combined final report on their recommendations on how
reducing environmental pollution can reduce the rate of asthma and
submitted it to the mayor. When they connected their education to
solving a problem in their community, the students found learning
motivating, meaningful, and enjoyable.
That
example also illustrates the fourth change I wish to propose: learning
as collaborative. What we see in the Madison example is how students
work together, pool their collective strengths, and collaborate in
solving a problem. There is more strength and more knowledge when four
people put their heads together. More importantly, collaborative
learning develops a new attitude and value towards learning, based on
cooperation. The examination-based learning in our community has
developed in us a lot of selfishness. Each student for himself or
herself, seems to be the guiding principle. We are expected to show how
we can outsmart the other students. However, in the adult world of work,
we need to collaborate with others to solve problems or implement
changes.
While
collaboration between students is important, another sort of
collaboration now involves teachers and students. Even teachers are
adopting the attitude that they are not there to lecture to students,
pretend they are the sole authorities on all kinds of knowledge, or give
the right answers that have to be accepted uncritically. Teachers now
think of themselves as facilitators of learning. They arrange the class,
texts, and assignments in such a way that students can collaborate with
each other and with teachers to learn creatively and critically. In my
teaching in the US, I am always open to the possibility that some
students might know more about certain areas or topics than me. When I
am asked a question for which I don’t know the answer, I immediately
confess that and promise to find it out in the next class rather than
giving students a false answer simply to save my honor. I am open to
being challenged by students on some of my positions, and engage in a
dialogue with them to move to a higher understanding. Rather than
portraying me as a weak teacher, this collaborative attitude actually
shows that I am strong and confident. I know what I know that I can be
humble about my limitations and be open to learning new knowledge from
others.
This
attitude is going to be difficult for Sri Lankan teachers who are
treated like Gods. I want to discuss a particularly controversial
practice in our teaching in this country that is drawing a lot of
attention these days: Caning, or corporal punishment. Recently, I have
received many email messages from Tamil people living abroad. They tell
me: Teachers in Sri Lanka seem to have no limits on how they can use
either the cane or their own hands in hitting their students. In some
cases, this goes beyond punishment to physical abuse. Students end up
with marks all over their body. We have to start a discussion in our
community on the relative effectiveness of caning versus non-physical
punishment.
Physical
punishment has been banned in many countries. It has been absent from
French schools since the 19th century. In 2008 a teacher was fined for
slapping a student in France. In UK, in state-run schools, and also in
private schools where at least part of the funding came from government,
corporal punishment was outlawed by Parliament with effect from 1987.
The Supreme Court of Canada outlawed caning in 2004. In the US, it is
left to each state to develop a policy for schooling. Majority of the
states have banned caning in public schools. New Jersey was the earliest
to ban it in 1867. Physical punishment has also been banned from many
socialist countries because they believe that it is contrary to
socialist values. From the 1917 revolution onwards, corporal punishment
was outlawed in Russia and the Soviet Union. Other socialist countries
have followed this practice. In all these countries, if a teacher hits a
student, he or she will be taken to the courts.
However,
not caning or hitting the student doesn’t mean not punishing.
Punishment is important for cultivating discipline. But certain
non-corporal forms of punishment can be more effective. For example, my
11 year old son is very talkative in the class. He is very naughty and
gets punished a lot. But he has never been slapped or caned. Teachers
have many other good options. They can detain him after school or keep
him in the class while others are playing during the interval. When
other students earn reward points for being good, he will lose his
points. These points are used at the end of the school year to buy
things donated by parents. In the worst case, the parents can be called
up (which my wife and I did once) or he can be suspended from school
(which hasn’t happened to him yet: Thank God!). Some of these forms of
punishment are very effective because they motivate my son to be good on
his own recognition. He has the choice of either earning points or
losing them, and suffer the consequences at the end of the year. So,
caning motivates students negatively through fear and pain, rather than
positively by encouraging students to do better.
I
know that many parents and teachers in our community feel “aTiyaata
maaTu paTiyaatu” ( The bull/cow which is not whipped will not learn) and feel that caning is the only form of effective
punishment. But soon we have to come to terms with the changing
orientations to punishment and schooling around the world. We are living
in a connected world where events and practices in one community are
relayed to others in a matter of minutes. If a student in Jaffna gets
beaten this morning, his uncles, aunts, and cousins in UK, Canada,
Australia, and the US know within minutes how many times he was beaten,
how many marks he has on his body, and which doctor he was taken to. So
many Tamil people abroad have started asking: “Why is this primitive
practice still continuing in our community? Why are teachers so abusive,
angry, and out of control with their students? Are teachers taking out
their own frustrations on their students? Is caning a legalized form of
cruelty in our community? Is caning a reflection of how our community
has become comfortable with violence after many years of war?”
That
brings me to the final point: learning as cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan
means being a global citizen. Today we cannot separate ourselves from
developments in other communities. As I just mentioned, we cannot think
anymore that what we do in Jaffna will remain isolated in Jaffna. Within
minutes it is known all over the world. More broadly, our fate is
interconnected with the fate of other communities. Think of the global
economic crisis, climate change, nuclear arms, and environmental
pollution. What one community does affects all of us. So, it is
important for our students to develop the attitudes, values, and
orientations to consider other cultures and people. However, being
cosmopolitan doesn’t mean losing our own values and identity. A better
approach is to be proud of who we are, as we engage with other cultures.
This is a two-way process. We can evaluate the things we learn from
others from the point of view of our own culture and society. But we
should also be open-minded so that we can be self-critical and change
our values and traditions. In fact, when we engage with other cultures
and learn new perspectives, we might in fact rediscover the secrets and
wisdom of our communities that we may have forgotten over time.
Let
me apply cosmopolitanism to my talk this morning. Are the new
traditions of learning I am proposing influenced by my engagement with
other cultures? To some extent they are. I am now a teacher
educator—that means a person who trains others to be teachers. What I
have shared with you are the principles that guide my teaching
philosophy when I teach students from US and many other countries to
become good teachers. However, remember that I started this talk by
appreciating some of the traditions St John’s shaped me with—i.e.,
reading, speaking, thinking, and planning. I criticized many trends in
the western world—such as instant communication and multi-tasking—that
are leading young people to losing these important skills. St John’s
should continue to develop the positive traditions in its history.
However, there are other ways in which St John’s should develop a new
educational tradition—namely,learning as creative, critical, civic,
collaborative, and cosmopolitan. Even these are not new to our culture.
My engagement with other cultures helps me rediscover elements in our
culture that we may have forgotten. So think about Auvayaar’s saying
“kaTRatu kai maNNaLavu kallaatatu uLakaLavu” (i.e., What we know is a
fistful, what we don’t know is a world full.) This verse reminds us why
we have to think of learning as creative, collaborative, and critical.
No one can be satisfied with what we already know. We have to constantly
critique what we accept as truths. Or think of Puranaanuuru: “yaatum
ooree yaavarum keeLir” (i.e., Every place is our village, every person
our kin). This verse reminds us of the importance of cosmopolitanism and
engaging in civic learning that is useful to all people.
The
changes that I spell out this morning have also been present in the
missionary history of our school. Just think of the founder of our
school Joseph Knight. When he came to Sri Lanka in July 1818, he was a
representative of the Church Missionary Society. This society opposed
the practice of treating Africans as slaves. They thus displayed
critical thinking. Before he started classes for local students in
Nallur, he first learnt Tamil language with the help of a local Hindu
priest. It must have been difficult for both parties to engage in such
learning. Knight would have thought of the Hindu priest as a heathen,
and the priest would have thought of Knight as unclean. It is said that
the Hindu priest used to stop by at a village well after these classes
to cleanse himself before he went home. Despite their cultural
differences, both people collaborated in learning from each other. That
was not only collaborative learning, it was also cosmopolitanism. Both
didn’t change their own systems of belief; but that didn’t prevent them
from cooperating and learning from each other and enriching their world
view. Knight went on to lay the foundation for the first Tamil/English
bilingual dictionary. When the Winslow’s Comprehensive Tamil and English
Dictionary was published in Madras in 1862, the preface acknowledges
how Rev. Knight had started and contributed to this project. That was
civic learning—i.e., knowledge that was useful to other people. There is
also creativity, because Knight sought new knowledge. He started a
comparative exploration of Tamil and English that we are still
continuing today. Knight went on to start lessons for 7 students in his
house in March 1823, before renovating the decaying Old Dutch Church at
Nallur and getting permission from the government to start a school
there. Motivated by a vision and sprit of service, Knight established a
new institution and invented new traditions that have gone on to be a
blessing to thousands of youth in our town.
Today
there is a similar challenge for all of us to be missionaries, path
breakers, tradition-builders in our community. With one history of our
community coming to an end, we are in the beginning of another. We are
almost starting from scratch. Buildings have been demolished, community
leaders killed, families displaced, students orphaned. The question for
our school is: what kind of education is going to address the changes
around us. The task of slowly rebuilding our community is starting. Old
boys have been sending money to St John’s to put up new buildings and
support displaced and orphaned students. But an important question
everyone is asking now is this: St John’s is proud of the new buildings
it has put up; but is it paying enough attention to building the moral,
spiritual, and intellectual life of its students? Should the school be
more interested in building up the quality of education needed for the
new age?
This
is the time to initiate new traditions of learning and education for St
John’s College. Though we may be materially disadvantaged, we are still
culturally, spiritually, and intellectually rich. Buildings may be
destroyed; but nothing can destroy our mind and soul. Nothing can stop
someone’s mind from growing, influencing others, shaping the environment
around us, conquering disadvantages, and achieving great things. This
is the story of Johnians from the past. We grew up in a disadvantaged
community, with less buildings than you have now. But that didn’t stop
us from achieving impressive things on the global stage. It was not
about what material resources we had. It was about what cultural,
spiritual, and intellectual resources we developed in our community. You
students can still achieve all that. You can develop to be powerful
inventors, thinkers, and leaders, though now you may not have a house
over your heads, family to care for you, or enough things to provide a
comfortable life.
Remember
our school motto: “Light shineth in darkness”. It is precisely at this
time in our history that we are called upon to shine. And the only thing
light can do, something that comes naturally to it, is shine! I wish
the staff of St John’s college, the parents, the local community, and
especially the students the very best as they work towards building more
meaningful educational traditions for the future.
Speech
by Prof. Suresh Canagarajah,Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied
Linguistics and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA, at the THE
ANNUAL PRIZE GIVING was held on Saturday 6th July, 2013, at St.John’s college Jaffna in Sri Lanka
