Sri Lanka’s celebrated management guru, Prof. Gunapala Nanayakkara, a practical educational reformer in his own right, has released his latest publication, Transforming Education: The Way Forward in Sri Lanka [1].
The book is the result of his active engagement in university-level education for more than six decades and his service as Director General of the National Institute of Education after his retirement from academia.
Nanayakkara created Sri Lanka’s premier management school, the Postgraduate Institute of Management (PIM), as an affiliated institute of the University of Sri Jayewardenepura (USJ) in the early 1980s from scratch, nurtured it into what it is today, and linked it with industry both in Sri Lanka and abroad.
As I explained in a previous article in this series, Nanayakkara, a student of the first Dean of Management Studies and Commerce at USJ, Prof. Dharma de Silva, realised Dharma’s dream of creating a separate business school affiliated with the main university but located in Colombo, many years after the latter had left Sri Lanka’s university system [2]. Nanayakkara is, therefore, an academic who can speak authoritatively on the transformation of the country’s education system.