I can agree with you in 1 way, but I see the issues in more than 100 ways. With all due respect, I can sayy yes the so called free education has done more damage to us than the benefits. Look at USA. As far as I know most of the schools are not fully free. Are they under developed ? 100000 times developed than SL. Free education let the stupid idiots from those villages to come to the state Universitries & start ragging to kill innocent students. This is a result from the free education. Have you ever seren a student from Royal College - Colombo got caught in ragging in any university. Maybe possible for those who come to the school since 2:00 in the morning travelling 100km per day. This is why I say class or living standards can't be bought. They are there for a reason. You are open for your comments. Feel free. If the education is fully paid & only in English, more opportunities will open for the people who can afford. Then automatically those who are farmers & janitors will do their jobs. we just need the real capitalistic system. Exactly what Adam Smith introduced.
You’re mixing up correlation, class prejudice, and bad policy into one argument and calling it “100 reasons.”
Using the United States as your example actually weakens your point. The US didn’t become developed because education is expensive. It became developed because it invested massively in public education, research universities, and access. Even today, public schools and state universities are a huge part of that system. High fees are widely criticized for creating inequality, not praised as a success model. (e.g., the Sugar-Daddy concept became more and more famous because students couldn't afford the university fees)
And let’s be real about consequences. When education becomes unaffordable, people don’t magically “stay in their place”.they struggle. You even see extreme cases where students fall into exploitative situations just to fund their studies. So what’s your answer to that? What happens to capable students who don’t have money? Do they just give up? That’s not a system, that’s exclusion.
Ragging isn’t caused by free education. It’s caused by weak enforcement, toxic university culture, and poor administration. Blaming “village students” is just lazy scapegoating.
And this idea that only wealthy, English-speaking students should be educated? That’s not “capitalism.” That’s just elitism(ප්රභූවාදය) dressed up with buzzwords like Adam Smith. Even Smith argued that education should be accessible because an uneducated population weakens a nation.
What you’re proposing would:
Kill social mobility(Blocking people from moving up in society)
Killing diversity(Reducing the mix of people (backgrounds, cultures, classes, perspectives))
Shrink the skilled workforce
Lock the country into permanent inequality
Sri Lanka’s free education system produced generations of professionals from every background. Remove that, and you don’t get a “better class”, then you get a smaller, weaker country run by a tiny privileged circle.
And this obsession with “class” and “villages” says more about your mindset than reality. Talent isn’t born in Colombo alone, but it’s everywhere. Education is what unlocks it.
If you actually care about fixing things, talk about discipline, accountability, and quality in universities, but not excluding people because they’re not rich enough for your comfort.