When will they ever learn?

The Sri Lankan engine has been switched off, both by choice and compulsion. Private sector employees remain marooned in their own homes owing to fuel shortages and an overburdened public transport system. 

Last Friday a two-week shutdown of Government offices and schools, within Colombo as well as major cities was announced; the lack of dollars to pay for imported fuel held as the main cause. Since then public institutions and local councils have since been asked to maintain “skeleton services”. 

This was following authorities declaring the previous Friday a holiday in a desperate bid to conserve fuel. Nevertheless, mile-long queues were seen outside filling stations last Friday, with many motorists waiting in line for days to fill up their tanks. Since the beginning of May, Sri Lanka’s fuel shortage has blown up beyond expectations leading to longer queues and the fuel starved populace violently clashing with Police over discrepancies in distribution.

The Education Ministry has declared that all schools remain closed for two weeks from Monday. Moreover, encouragements have been made to ensure online teaching in the event students and teachers have access to the necessary devices and electricity. Permission has also been granted to the provincial and district officers to make decisions regarding the schools in rural and other areas, where there are no transportation issues and most residents do not rely on fuel for locomotion. 

While at a primary and secondary level, the decisions have been made, Sri Lanka’s brightest remain in the dark about the continuation of their studies. Sri Lanka’s largest State-run university, the University of Peradeniya, was closed until further notice due to the current crisis. 

As Peradeniya University Vice Chancellor M.D. Lamawansa said in a letter to the students and faculty, all academic programs including examinations have been temporarily discontinued and all hostels will be closed immediately until further notice. The university attendants were since informed to leave the university premises with immediate effect.

While these pauses to education are inevitable within the current context, the response to the problem appears as a band-aid, ignoring the obvious solution of distance learning. In Sri Lanka, schools have been largely dysfunctional for over 16 months since the initial shutdown in March 2020. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, while adequate time was available for the education system to explore and implement alternatives to in person classes, lectures and examinations, this appears to be yet another missed opportunity. Compounded with the mental turmoil students are to suffer in current conditions there are also adverse physical health effects now exacerbated due to food shortages. 

Since shutdown orders came back in 2020, seemingly with the UN launched emergency response to the island’s unprecedented economic crisis, approximately two thousand pregnant women who were facing food shortages have been looked after. 

According to the UN published report at the time, four out of five people in Sri Lanka have started skipping meals as they cannot afford to eat, sounding alarm bells of a looming humanitarian crisis with millions of children in desperate need of aid. Distressing testimonies from children have been reported as children leave their schools to attend health centres in order to obtain access to nutrition. 

This is even more worrying in a country where poverty has been greatly aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a recent UN report Sri Lanka was among the countries with the longest school closures experienced in the world. The disruption caused by the pandemic has resulted in widening inequalities and learning losses that threaten to reverse and, in the worst case, completely erase the gains made over the past decades.