Tags
Academic Affairs Board, Acts of Faith, Ayagama, Chandrika Kumaratunga, Deniyaya, Ena de Silva, Getamanna, Hayes-Lauderdale Road, Kalawana, Karu Jayasuriya, Karunasena Kodituwakku, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Minister of Education, Ministry of Education, National Institute of Education, Panadura-Ratnapura Road, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sabaragamuwa University, Sooriyakanda, Teldeniya, Tissamaharama, UNP
In 2005 I had a sabbatical, but spent most of it in Sri Lanka, partly because, for the last six months of that year I continued to be a Consultant in English at the Ministry of Education. My main task was to revitalize the English medium programme we had started in 2001, which had flagged in the period in which Ranil Wickremesinghe was Prime Minister and seemed determined to kill it. Fortunately his Minister of Education, Karunasena Kodituwakku, was supportive, which helped it to survive until Tara de Mel came back as Secretary in 2004 and got me back in service.
She also got a lot more out of me, since I chaired the Academic Affairs Board of the National Institute of Education, and we started a radical programme of syllabus revision. Unfortunately we began too late, and it was only in 2005 that she overcame the objections of the educational establishment, so we had a lot of hectic work that year, very little of which unfortunately survived her departure when a new Minister who disliked her intensely took over. Though he told me he wanted me to stay on, I realized the old guard were back with a vengeance, so at the end of the year I took myself away. This allowed me to have a few months abroad early in 2006, for the launch of the Italian translation of Acts of Faith, which ended in the Ena figure marrying the President.
