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'Sinhala Only' education documents still in place

Tamil teachers continue to face continued discrimination with documents being provided in Sinhala only, rather than in Tamil, charged the Ceylon Teachers Union.

CTU General Secretary Joseph Stalin stated,

“Most of the teachers are employed in Tamil schools and there isn’t a single form in the Tamil language. All documents and circulars in the Provincial Education Zone are in Sinhala, and this is extremely unfair on the Tamil teachers. Nothing is done to rectify this despite National Languages Minister Vasudeva Nanayakkara’s claims that every document will be trilingual".

Citing the town of Hatton as an example, Stalin noted that there were 34 Sinhala schools and 114 Tamil schools, employing 2,509 teachers, most of whom were Tamil. Yet documents at the Educational Zonal Office were in Sinhala only.

See also our earlier posts: 

'Strict Criteria' (Dec 2010) and 'Ethnocracy' (Nov 2010)
 

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