Educational Legislation and Educational Development: Compulsory Education in Ceylon

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE ATTEMPTS to examine the various factors that influenced the introduction of legal provision for compulsory education in Ceylon and the machinery employed for the enforcement of these legal provisions with a view to ascertain the extent to which the legal measures for compulsory education effectively encouraged the development of elementary education. The story of the adoption of compulsory education in Ceylon is not yet complete, but it has a fairly long history. In fact, it has been argued that compulsory education in Ceylon really began in 1871 with the enactment of the Village Committees Ordinance of that year permitting groups of villages to construct and maintain school rooms and to frame rules to secure the attendance of children in schools. Since provision for the enforcement of these rules was left entirely to the discretion of the village committees, the Ordinance proved to be only moderately successful, in spite of the fact that the powers of the village committees were further defined by a subsequent Ordinance. (i) The village committees, however, took a very leisurely and almost indifferent attitude toward compulsory education, so much so that, even at the beginning of the present century only something like compulsory education existed. (2) Nevertheless when after the coffee crisis the Government decided, Mr. Sirisena is Director of Education (Secondary Education) in the Ministry of Education of Ceylon.