Sri Lanka is awaiting cabinet approval of a proposal to make Sunday school education compulsory for students aged 6-19 of all religions after the Christian Affairs Ministry sought feedback from Catholic priests about the idea earlier.
Father Piyal Janaka Fernando, institute director of the National Catechetical, Educational and Biblical Centre, forwarded their feedback to the government. Officials reportedly approached the priests based on their experience but plan to make Sunday lessons mandatory for Buddhists, Catholics, Hindus and students of other faiths, too. The issue was proposed in 2017 by Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith and chief Buddhist monks in the wake of a series of demonstrations against extra-curricular school-related teaching on Sundays.
Cardinal Ranjith even wrote to Sri Lanka’s president urging that tutorial classes be banned on Sundays from 6am to 2pm so they do not interfere with religious instruction.
Many private tutors work at weekends focusing on secular studies as this can result in a lucrative side income given the intensifying competition for the national school qualifying exams each year.
The Catholic Church has 1,155 Sunday schools, over 13,000 teachers and nearly 202,000 students in 12 dioceses across the country. A cabinet paper will be submitted at an as-yet-undecided date to the ministers in charge of all religions to implement a six-day study week with a focus on religious teaching on Sundays, said Buddhist Affairs Minister Gamini Jayawickrema Perera. He made the remarks while addressing a meeting in the North Western Provincial capital of Kurunegala on March 29. The move is aimed at installing more discipline in young people, he added. When Cardinal Ranjith called for the ban on tutorial classes, the argument he shared with other religious leaders was that these were detrimental to a child’s spiritual education as they preclude enrolment at Sunday school.
