All these years every citizen of our country was blessed with free education and thanks to that the literacy rate was well over 90%. As Sri Lanka being a third world country majority of the citizens falls between middle and lower income category, so the free education plays a critical role to help build their lives by opening up the doors to reach out the world.
I’m happy to say that thanks to our country’s free education policy I was able to continue my education up to obtaining my Bachelor’s Degree, which helped me to engaged in a field that gave me the opportunity to give something valuable to my country and to its people. While I was in the university got the opportunity to enrich my knowledge across vast number of areas. Although my degree title says B. Sc. in Information Technology but the content of it didn’t restrict me to a limited knowledge domain. During my eight semesters and four June terms I took around 5o modules but for a student how does a similar degree in a private institute will get the opportunity to take just above half of it. In my three years of industry engagement I got the opportunity to work with just over 50 odd people and to interview nearly 100 candidates, the common factors I notice while working and interviewing people who obtained their bachelors degree from private institutions them are as follows.
- Majority of them lack the knowledge of fundamentals.
- Majority of them knew just to shoot out fancy words but failed to deliver results.
- Majority of them lacked the enthusiasm of learning and advancing themselves to the next level.
- Majority of them used that knowledge just to earn a salary.
By looking at the current situation of our country’s education I really feels scary about its future because we have come to a critical point which is at the verge loosing the benefit of free education. Our country has three ministers assigned to look after the activities of the education system but unfortunately what has happened can be easily describe by saying “too may cooks spoil the broth”.
- Every year all the major public exams are full of faulty questions
- Results of the public exams are faulty.
- Officials responsible for the above mentioned issues were not properly punished and same issues were repeated every year.
- Has drastically reduced the government funding over the years to less than 2 % of the GDP.
We should get together and join hands to protect the free education for our future generation, failing to do so will cause a great misery to the development of our country and will made our future generation suffer from it. For example currently the US citizens are facing a huge crisis settling the loans obtain for their education, lets not help to develop such a staggering environment here.
