Policy adjustment needed for employability

KELANIYA: Finding employment for Arts graduates has posed a major problem in a country where the State is no more the single employer in the country and in the current scenario the main requirement is to construct and adjust policies that would guarantee employment and employability, Higher Education Minister Prof. Wisva Warnapala said.

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the Confucius Institute Laboratory at the University of Kelaniya Prof. Warnapala said the study of modern languages to some degree could solve this problem of employability for Arts graduates.

The Minister said, in Sri Lanka, primarily due to the nature of the beginning of University education, the Social and Humanities began to develop in the Universities and today, in terms of student enrolment, it accounts for nearly 22,000 students.

In other words, the largest undergraduate enrolment is in this area of study and it, therefore, needs due attention. Sri Lankan intellectual enterprises, as Howard Wriggins once rightly noted, came to be developed in the initial phase around scholars who specialised in Humanities.

It is in this light that the importance of the establishment of the Language Laboratory needs to be assessed, and I, before adverting my attention to that task, would like to speak a couple of words on Confucius, whose great name has been used for this Institute; it was Confucius who founded a philosophy which dominated Chinese life from AD 124 to 1906.

His writings seem to be concerned with moral self-cultivation and self-improvement. His view was that knowledge is not knowledge until applied in action.

Yet another important idea of his, which attracted me, was that ‘only the enlightened scholar can explain and predict the rise and fall of States and scholars, therefore, are the repository of accumulated political wisdom and social norms’. His political and educational thoughts had influenced China for over two thousand years.

The name of such a renowned scholar has been used for this Institute, which I am told, is established for the purpose of promoting studies relating to Chinese langauge and culture. In other words, the teaching of the Chinese language is to be promoted as a modern language.

The University of Kelaniya making use of its association with a historical center for learning in the country, has now emerged as the main centre in the Sri Lankan universities structure, which specialises in the teaching of Modern Languages. They include such languages as German, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean and nearly 1,000 students are registered for Degree and Certificate Courses.

The courses in the Modern Languages have been organised with a view to meeting the requirements of the world of work. Today, in the present context of the process of globalisation, different countries have emerged as global players in the area of economic development and they, through a process of economic integration, are competing in the global market place.

China, as an emerging economic power in the region, has entered this process, and the Chinese language, therefore, has now become an international language. Several decades, for that matter, immediately after de-colonisation, international language status was given to four or five European languages, and this again was due to their economic dominance.

The ability to gain proficiency in those languages helped to find jobs abroad, and today, with the emergence of several countries in our part of the world as economic giants, the languages of these countries though not belonging to the European linguistic traditions, have become very relevant to the process of development.

Today there is a global market for advanced human capital, and the international mobility of skilled human resources can have a positive impact on development. In my view, the production of more graduates with modern language skills would help the country, as their skills are marketable in the globalised world.

If the students are interested in studying modern languages, they need to be provided with facilities and it is in this way that Sri Lankan Universities can break away from their traditional mould which, at the given point of time, has become outmoded.