Occupying Sri Lanka’s military governor in Jaffna, Maj. Gen. Chandrasri now schemes to bring more than 1000 nursery schools functioning in Jaffna under the control of genocidal Colombo. As a preliminary step, the SL governor wants to ‘aid’ and affiliate the schools to the military-controlled administration of the Northern Provincial Council. Amidst controversies, a meeting for pre-school teachers was convened on Saturday at Veerasingham Hall in Jaffna. SL Presidential sibling Basil Rajapaksa attending the meeting announced payment of salaries to pre-school teachers and eventual absorption of them into ‘government’ service. While the deeper intention of the agenda was eyeing on tender children of Eezham Tamils, the presidential sibling also chose the occasion to attack the TNA to campaign for the civic elections scheduled this month.
The nursery schools for children between 3 and 5 year old are at present run privately, mostly by unemployed young women or by grass root socio-cultural institutions.
While the concept of nursery school or pre-school itself, which is a product of ultra-urban life, is controversial to the rural-urban settings of Jaffna, there is nothing worse than the nursery schools being taken over by a state having explicit genocidal intentions, commented an academic in Jaffna.
Last year, genocidal Sri Lanka wanted the school children of Jaffna to sing the so-called national anthem of Sri Lanka in Sinhalese.
During the colonial rule of the British when the native revival movements started free educational institutions of a different genre, the colonial administrators employed the same technique of ‘aid’ to control them.
Eventually, the Sinhala-Buddhist dominated ‘independent Ceylon’ used that control as well as attraction of ‘government employment’ to teachers, to ‘take over’ leading educational institutions of Eezham Tamils, ultimately to deprive them of their excellence in education and bring Tamils as subordinates under the educational leadership of Sinhalese and their institutions.
The danger today is not only a genocidal state controlling educational institutions of Eezham Tamils from university to kindergartens now, but also larger international forces ‘aiding’ the genocidal state deciding behind the scene what is education, the academic in Jaffna said.
The Tamils who are in the educational service of genocidal Sri Lanka or ‘advise’ the colonial governor and talk of education and ‘development’ citing American educationalists, should not forget what Mark Twain, one of the finest American writers of modern times, wrote after witnessing a convent on his brief visit to Colombo by the end of 19th century, the Tamil academic said.
Mark Twain, who was enjoying the sight of natives in their colourful dresses in Pettah in Colombo, found the scene of convent children coming in line and in uniform, as ‘ugly’.
“What an ugly scene,” Mark Twain wrote on the convent children and the accompanying teachers.
The debate on how to bring up children of a nation and how to educate them has to be left to the parents of that nation. Snatching away the children of a subjugated nation at a tender age to alienate them from their local genius and to introduce them to a genocide-intended curriculum or corporate-friendly curriculum in the name of ‘development’ has to be resisted to the core by the nation of Eezham Tamils, the Jaffna academic further said.
Meanwhile, the act of SL colonial governor in Jaffna initiating the Northern Provincial Council to take control of the kindergartens, even before an elected provincial council come into effect to debate and decide on such a move, only show that either Colombo has decided on continuing the military rule or it is sure of manipulating and capturing the council, if at all the elections ever take place, a politician in Jaffna said.
Addressing the meeting for the pre-school teachers on Saturday, Basil Rajapaksa said that the aim of SL president Mahinda Rajapaksa is to make Sri Lanka a leading developed country in entire Asia.
Because of the war two generations in the north lost everything and now they should get everything, he said.
Attacking the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), he said that it has not done anything to Tamils, but is always keen on finding fault with the SL government. By collaborating with the SL government, minister Douglas Devananda is doing a lot of things and TNA tries to claim the credit, he accused.
Douglas Devananda and another SL minister Hisbullah were present at the meeting along with Basil Rajapaksa.
The civic elections for town and village councils are scheduled to take place on 23 July.
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