How to return to your school with gifts

Wendell W. SOLOMONS

OPPORTUNISM: The red ribbon was being cut. On October 2, 2006, the opening of a PC lab was being done by a past pupil of the girls' school, by a present pupil and by the School Head.

It was a remarkable experience for me and not because I was a male seduced by beautiful roses.

The past pupil who cut the ribbon for the gift of PCs expressed a good deal when she credited the arrival of the PCs at school to "teamwork."

She was bringing out what a well-known convention for sports and school can accomplish. It was a treasury of thought that she awoke in me.

For several recent decades people who watch Western network TV have been steered towards self-deification. This results is an opportunism expressed by the maxim, "The secret of success is finding someone to blame."

This gives an opportunism that results in 'a war of each against the other' in many old-established local companies. Customer service has been waning. The period of 'each man rows his own canoe' has also had serious consequences in the fast track West, with large companies collapsing in scandal.

If the guiding principle is 'each man rows his own canoe' there's no one left to clear the river of silt and boulders. The river may no longer flow smoothly.

In like manner Colombo's roads don't often flow smoothly; they develop immense traffic jams. The psychological trick wasn't forced on Singapore whose children once schooled in Colombo. That country developed public transport instead of 'each man rows his own canoe.'

The Presbyterian Balika Vidyalaya arose under the Dutch Reformed Church in 1918. The DRC had arrived as a department of the Dutch East India Company but when the British government took over that company, the DRC became an independent church run by a council of elders (who were called Presbyters.)

Finally, the DRC's Presbyterian Girls School of Regent Street, Colombo, was taken into Sri Lanka's government network of schools.

Like all schools in the country, the school used both excellence of the individual and of teamwork. Looking at the number of green playing fields, visiting Australian cricketers have mused on what Britain wanted for its territory in far away Colombo.

That tells us how British statesmen rated the teamwork that sports accentuate, a spirit that would create competent and versatile executives for business and government affairs.

Three decades ago came the opposite of what Singapore had been allowed to practise. The social or community good was submerged by psychological warfare of the Chicago School of Economics. British PM Margaret Thatcher came out one day to exclaim, "There's no such thing as society - they're only individuals and families."

The exercise or drill for psychological warfare was to flatter the business sector by calling it 'the engine of progress.' Old established companies wouldn't demoralise the public sector with that but hot money individuals began to attack the pubic sector so as to syphon off revenue.

The end result we see today is a demoralising of both private and public sectors. Everyone pays VAT and the international pawnbroker smiles because Sri Lanka gets more tightly tied in paying interest.

I was asking Mrs. H. D. Somawathie, school head for 11 years about teamwork in the school now. She replied that children from four ethnic groups study in the school and that she fosters a spirit of amity.

Her answer tackles the next problem that arrived in Sri Lanka.

A 'war of each against the other' had resulted in ethnic bickering, at levels that schools had not experienced before the psychological operation called 'Open Economy.'

I suggested that one way to overcome wrong impressions in school children is to encourage questions in class. It seems easier for teachers now with small incomes (the USD exchanged for Rs. 8 in 1977 and a kilo of green beans cost the same Rs. 8 in Colombo) to deliver an uninterrupted discourse and then leave class.

However, if questions are encouraged, then pupils would learn teamwork better in class - how could one waste other pupils' time - and also help better teach the subject, Mathematics for example. Participative education has demonstrated better studies than passive listening sessions.

I then asked Mrs. Somawathie about school tradition. I asked her whether the school employed past pupils as teachers. She said that the school did have past pupils. She stressed on the importance of a school's traditions.

Boys schools in Colombo have had a different record. Where I studied, old masters where phased out particular by US-educated Bogada Premaratne. His new teachers were principally women with a background far from that of the school. So, motivation in the school has changed.

I won't close by washing my hands with the tempting parlour phrase, "Nothing goes right in this country."

If making a gift is difficult, we can search for the correct target for our effort. If women's schools preserve traditions better today - then that is where our gifts should go. Women become caring mothers, just like in the past.

Yet, the share of women who are breadwinners in the family has increased many fold so that women tend to play a larger role as decisions makers in the family. Finally, a warm felicitation to Presbyterian Balika Vidyalaya and its Past Pupils Association for a message worth conveying to the country.