While towers and skyscrapers, five-star hotels, super-highways and infrastructure development projects are going on at an accelerated pace, most Sri Lankans appear to be unaware or not taking urgent action to protect our most precious treasure – the younger generation.
The National Child Protection Authority Chairperson Anoma Dissanayake and other prominent personalities spotlighted vital factors on this issue during a popular television talk show last Sunday. They said the highly-competitive, examination-oriented education system with the tuition mania,  the consumerist society driven again by highly competitive market forces and the negatives of the new information and communication technology era were among the factors that had taken the younger generation to a dead end with little by way of a vision, mission and goals in life.

As for education, most people and social analysts believe the three ministries for education have individually and collectively put most children into one hell of a mess where they do not know where to go or whom to turn to. One of the major negative factors is the grade 5 scholarship examination which forces or provokes children into a highly competitive arena early in life. Those who pass it find it difficult to get out of the competitive spirit later in life and knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly, they want to win always. If possible by fair means, otherwise by foul. As a result of this selfishness, self-centredness and colour-washed greed – the cardinal sins in liberative spirituality – the children end up in a miserable state without contentment, fulfilment and a meaningful purpose in life. They become miserable, sometimes with self-destructive tendencies and they make others also miserable.

With society pushing them and pulling them in the competitive and consumerist way, the children, even in the GCE “O” Levels and “A” Levels, have doubts whether their course of study is merely examination-oriented or job-oriented. Every child and indeed every person has five mental faculties – memory, knowledge, intelligence, creativity and imagination. Often our education system provides the opportunity for most children to grow in the first three faculties. But the other two, creativity and imagination, are neglected or not fully tapped. It is these two factors or faculties that have produced great inventors and literary figures. We are in the age of inventions with information technology, bio-technology and now nanotechnology, producing marvels that were once beyond our understanding, imagination or expectations.
But in the arena of technology – while communication has reached a push-button age and we could do in two hours what we earlier did in two months – there are also the negatives such as the growing abuse and the sex scandals of Facebook relationships.

Adding to this are the negative influences of the capitalist market economic system which create the acquisitive instinct and drive children to become rich fools instead of being content with what they have and enjoying the virtue of sharing and caring, especially for the needy and those who are trapped or enslaved in poverty.
To help the children turn around to a course that will not lead to a pigsty, the parents need to play a key role. The family is the cradle and nucleus of society, and it is in that domestic school that children need to be taught and trained to be unselfish, sincere and to use their talents and skills for the common good of all. The training in the home needs to be by example, not so much from books or a judgemental and condemnatory “I told you so“ attitude. If parents and especially mothers find quality time for their children and guide them with love on the various options they have and the choices they need to freely make, then we will have a solid foundation for the future. Then we will have, as Kipling says, young people who could keep their heads while others are losing theirs and blaming it on them; young people who could trust themselves while others doubt them and make allowance for their doubting too.