The Height of Foreign Mountains

While researching material for a history I am writing of my old school, St Thomas’s College, I found myself reading some speeches by Canon R.S. De Saram, who was Warden of the College during a very interesting period in our country’s history – the run-up to national independence and the years immediately following.

One of the principal causes of Lanka’s slow but inexorable reversion to barbarism is our national education policy, which despite much meddling with the details has retained the shape it assumed many years before Independence. Influenced by Sinhalese-Buddhist ‘nationalist’ imperatives and animated by a vengeful intent to destroy the power and privileges of the educated Anglophone elite, this policy was the work of C.W.W. Kannangara, who was appointed Minister of Education in the first democratically elected government of the country, taking office under British rule in 1931. His 1945 Education Bill, despite its laudable intent to extend free education to all Ceylonese, has been the source of a multitude of national woes.

Kannangara was chief guest at St Thomas’s on Prize Day, 1940, by which time his ideas concerning education and the nationalist demagoguery on which they were based were already matters of public controversy. De Saram, who fiercely opposed those ideas and values, was relatively gentle with Kannangara, to whom he addressed the following remarks:

[Yours] is a great and difficult task, for Education is a delicate matter; its problems vary with place and with the passage of time. In addition problems peculiar to Ceylon arise from our special conditions: problems connected with differences in language and religion. It is natural, therefore, that there should be criticism and that feeling should sometimes run high. This is in the main all to the good. It means that difficulties are being drawn into the open and being faced. It will however be unfortunate if the amount of criticism should cause us to forget the real progress that has been made. There are undoubtedly many things needing improvement in our educational system; but there are also, it is right to remember, a good many things about it that are excellent.

Again, it would be a pity if criticism should be allowed to degenerate into mere acrimony between those who differ on fundamental problems. Ill temper or partisanship will not solve our difficulties; nor the imposition by decree or otherwise of any one rigid system for all schools. On the contrary, toleration within limits of many varieties of educational practice is indicated by our varying conditions as the right and wise policy.

De Saram’s words fell, predictably, on deaf ears: the Minister’s own speech to the assembly indicated as much. Nothing daunted, the Warden tried again on Prize Day the following year. This time he spoke more frankly, for his principal auditor was the British governor, Sir Andrew Caldecott, an excellent administrator and a great friend of Ceylon. But the powers of the Governor of Ceylon were already waning by then, and there was little Caldecott could do but listen with approval.

That considerable uneasiness exists among schools like ours as to the trend of educational policy it is idle to try to conceal... To put it bluntly there is a feeling of hostility and lack of appreciation which is hard to understand. For we have but one object – to serve our country by providing for its sons the education that will best fit them for its service; and we are always eager and ready to cooperate in any policy which will secure that end. If our cooperation were frankly sought it would be freely given. In any case, whether policy be hostile to us or not we stand firm in the knowledge that we have a service to render to the country which is understood and appreciated by a very great number of people, and we shall continue to render it whatever comes...

Education in Ceylon is at this moment at a most interesting and, in some ways, a critical stage. On the one hand there is the already fully-awakened pride in our national life and heritage. On the other there is the solid fact that external forces, cultural, political and commercial, are affecting us and must affect us increasingly as the years go by... We can attempt to turn all our attention to one or other of these facts. Or we can attempt a synthesis... That this is the only sound course must be clear to every sensible person...

We [at St Thomas’s] have for long recognized how important it is that all boys should have a competent knowledge of Sinhalese and Tamil... As two Ministers of State who were our chief guests on two separate occasions have in their addresses laid great stress on the danger of neglecting our own heritage in the pursuit of knowledge of other countries and other cultures, I feel it is fair to say that we have taken this advice some twenty years or more before it was offered, and that ample place has been found in our syllabus for many years for a study of our own country, its history and languages, and to repudiate the suggestion, if it were implied, that we stood in any special need of this warning. To the query by one of these speakers as to what was the use of knowing the height of Mount Everest when we did not know the height of our own mountains we reply that knowing the height of our own mountains perfectly well, we regard it as of great importance to know that of Mt Everest as otherwise we might think our own the highest in the world. Similarly in the realms of intellect and of the spirit. There are eminences reached by the human intellect and the human spirit of which every cultured man should be aware: ‘What do they know of Ceylon who only Ceylon know?’

In 1945, three years before Independence, Kannangara’s famous (or infamous) Free Education Bill was passed in Parliament. In 1951, the government demanded that all private schools strictly follow the officially mandated syllabus and accept government oversight and control. Those that did not would be expelled from the national grant-in-aid system, depriving them of funds that would allow them to continue to function. Despite initial resistance, nearly all bowed to what they saw as the inevitable.

One school, at least, held out. De Saram, still Warden at St Thomas’s, refused to accept the government’s demands. Though STC already suffered from a heavy burden of debt (originally incurred in rebuilding the College at Mt Lavinia after being forced to move from Mutwal in 1918), De Saram accepted the crippling financial consequences in order to remain independent – that is, to continue to conduct classes in English for those to whom it was their mother-tongue, to teach subjects outside the syllabuses set by nationalist ideologues in the Department of Education, and to continue to offer boys from Christian families an education guided by Anglican religious and moral principles.

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Reggie de Saram retired as Warden of St Thomas’s the year I was born. When I was in the senior forms at STC in the late Seventies the consequences of his great decision were still evident. The beautiful Neoclassical senior classroom block did not have a single window without at least one broken pane; the forms inside those classrooms were still Edwardian wrought-iron, with the names of Ceylonese notables of an earlier era carved into their jakwood tops; they were, in fact, so rubbled with illicit carving that you had to put an exercise-book under the sheet of paper you wished to write on, or your pencil would soon make a hole in it. The College grounds were drab and dusty, with only a minimum of funds spent on their upkeep; the equipment for cricket and other sporting and extracurricular activities was hard-worn and patched-together, as were the hymnals in the Chapel and even the choristers’ and servers’ cassocks. At least a third of the staff were of pensionable age, some of them physically decrepit, but continuing to serve, on exiguous salaries, for love of the school.

Somehow we managed, and I would not change the education I received at St Thomas’s during those terrible lean years (which lasted decades) for any other, however well-furnished and privileged. In spite of the poverty and disrepair all about us, neither I nor my contemporaries doubted for one moment that we were at the best school in the world.

St Thomas’s does a lot better these days, now that national education policy (if it can still be called that) has become more liberal, and old alumni with deep pockets have helped the school pay off its debts and re-equip itself to the highest standards. Sometimes, visiting the College on research trips these days, I look about me and feel almost like an imposter. New buildings and evidence of modern technology everywhere I look, old buildings and grounds all spick and span, the Chapel once again robed in full High Church glory – STC now looks as grand as she deserves to. Her grandeur was, of necessity, somewhat occulted in my own day.

That was the fruit of De Saram’s great decision – the sacrifice he caused us, willy-nilly, to make, for the good of the future. Despite the inconvenience and austerity it imposed upon us as schoolboys, I don’t believe any of us are or were the worse for it. Its wisdom, indeed, is now beyond question, for the College has retained its independence of spirit and action because of it, and continues to serve the country as it always has. Meanwhile, Kannangara’s education policy has proven to be a disastrous failure, whose consequences the country is suffering, as I write, in the shape of an attempted constitutional coup that may well succeed simply because too few Sri Lankans have sufficient education or understanding to understand the gravity of their loss. Pity the country whose citizens no longer know the height of foreign mountains – or, indeed, their own.