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Thursday, June 12, 2014

Internet - Village Sri Lanka

internet

I live in a rural village in Sri Lanka. My village has electricity. No one is connected to the Internet in the village nor are any of the schools. There are a few people in the village who have fixed line phones and who can access the Internet.Many people in the village have mobile phones. There is a communication center in the nearest town where you can get on line for a fee and send or receive emails and bearing in mind the slow download speeds have access to the world wide web, though quite limited.

I believe in time we can start setting up Internet facilities in schools and get the youth in the villages to take up this medium and have access to the same information that any other student in any country has.

We cannot begin to start in this venture until the basic knowledge of English is improved so that this information that is available can be useful to them. This is the priority, as once this is done, the Internet costs and set up costs will come down and the hoped for access can be achieved.The youth are the future of the country. They have been able to take on the Internet like ducks to water once their knowledge of English is at an acceptable level. This is evidenced by the incredibly sophisticated blogs that some of the young people in Sri Lanka have managed to create. It is sad however that there appears to be a dearth of older people writing blogs in Sri Lanka as evidenced by some of the writings that appear to be more youth centric! as opposed to experience centric!

The teaching of English should be the priority. There are not enough teachers of English and firstly this should be addressed. I am willing to get involved in my local school in Giritale where even the parents are very disgruntled at the paucity of their children's education in all subjects.

Education - Sri lanka

education

What is education? I don't believe education is what we learn at school. It is only part of our education and we learn or should learn as much from our parents as we do from school and in that respect eduction is a life time learning process that never ceases.

If we all think in that way then there will not be a crisis in education. Qualifications only are useful to someone who is looking to see if you have the tools to do whatever it is required of you. However it does not show whether you can actually do the job. So an interviewer has to at the interview by various testing methods as well as by first impressions make the judgement call on whether you have the capabilities of carrying out the task at hand, and also if you don't at first, that you are likely to learn on the job.

On a broader sense education is important in how we live our lives, and as long as we believe we can learn something every day, we should be satisfied that we meet the criteria of being educated.

So now you know who I will refer to as an educated person. Not the PhD who comes to advise me on new farming techniques, but the farmer who cannot read, but can share 50 years of farming experience on the same land!