"While human identities are becoming increasingly localized. knowledge, awareness and empathy is becoming increasingly globalized. While the planet is shrinking to the size of each individual's home nation due to nation centric thought, that very nation is expanding to encopass the planet through information interchange. Educating children against this background  requires an intermesh of intensely local foundations and globally responsive thought and we would do our children a great disservice if we were tp choose the one over the other"

INTEGRATION THE BEST OF LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL METHODS

The analytical ability of South Asians and Sri Lankans in particular are among the highest in the world. Yet, despite the potential of such minds, there is a general idea among the population that Sri Lankans in Sri Lanka have made but scant use of it. In fact, there is a widely felt and totally erroneous feeling that anything that is imported is more valuable than anything made locally. So much so that there the phrase “We would accept the edicts of the Buddha and live more in accordance with them than we do now if it had been introduced to us by a foreigner”. We have taught ourselves that our systems, our traditions, are values and our approaches to life are inferior to that of others despite the fact that we enjoy a history centuries older than those that we have espoused, that lived far better and with far more insight than those that we have been told is good and valid, that created a far more durable version of life than that which we have been hypnotized into believing to be superior.

This self-debilitation or what is known in psychology as “learned helplessness” is the great tragedy of our times for nations such as ours. Instead of understanding that all methods of living have positives and negatives, we have attempted to mentally wipe out a greater, older, stronger set of Sri Lankan civilization and attempted to supplant it with imports. That effort created a social and emotional swill that was both unpalatable and indigestible as explained so well by the former governor of the Central Bank Dr. Neville Karunatileke in his book “A Confused Society”.

We should have known better. What we should have done instead of attempting to superimpose one thing on another thing was to have integrated the best of both words into a third space that would have led to a far stronger and more stable modern Sri Lankan society.

At Steiner College Local, this is exactly what we are doing. We are educating our young children on the strongest aspects of our traditions utilizing our local syllabi while grounding them in some of the more valuable soft skills required to engage with a world that is getting increasingly smaller. Through this approach, we will not only be preparing them to sit for their local examination without having to suffer through rotes but we will be providing those who enroll in the school with opportunities to engage with and contribute to the events and activities of the international school and thereby obtain a nationally recognized yet globally enabled education. This dual channel learning-input mechanism will allow them to enjoy the best of both worlds and solidify their ability to be contributing citizens working for the development of the country when they join our workforce subsequent to going through our portals of higher education.

The entire program is tailored to improve the skill set of the children following the local curriculum without cauterizing their creative and inventive abilities which has now become almost automatic given the rote-type methods used to prepare students to sit for local examinations. The nuancing of the Steiner anthroposophy and integrating it with the holistic traditions of education that we have built up over centuries will create a citizen with that unique blend of the local and international that will become mission critical as the emerging generation designs Sri Lanka to move forward into a sustainable future.