adminMorris Mtisi Education Panorama
I HAVE laboured to retrospect on the education system in colonial and independent Zimbabwe 35 years on, already. It is time to give a panoramic view of an ideal education curriculum for a future Zimbabwe. I will not attempt to imitate the thoughts of the Nziramasanga Commission Report for obvious reasons. First, I clearly do not have professorial qualification to do so and second, I neither have the space nor the financial privilege to offer a similar elaborate insight into the topic as contained in the 644-paged Nziramasanga Report and Recommendations of 1999.
It is satisfying, however, to know and acknowledge that the good doctor spoke and spoke very well in his 1999 report. Any attempt to repeat the assignment or even to remind Zimbabwe of his fine ideas and suggestions would not only be to try and reinvent a wheel but also literally underestimate Professor Nziramasanga’s intelligence and hard-work.
However, repetition of perfect ideas and philosophies of survival, of life, is not always futile recycling of wisdom. Jesus said it all. Today more than two thousand years after his death, we repeat his words and use Christian philosophies to live in this dangerous and difficult world.
It is my pleasure to draw insight and wisdom from the Nziramasanga “education bible”; but even more pleasure to give my own sermon intended to clarify a specific vision and ideal system of education for Zimbabwe.
I will as I hereby do, choose to sustain an argument which interrogates the wisdom of educational relevance within the existing system of education. I will do so in order to evaluate its value as a tool for national development. In as far as it is also an interrogation of educational value, national interests and concerns, this discourse is clearly a political statement, which though, remains educational politics and not, please note, politics of the science of power and government. This is simply intellectual or academic intercourse with the existing framework of education, looking into the future.
First, democracy in education will have to prevail and flourish and stop being influenced by selecting subject matter (curricula) of instruction with utilitarian ends narrow-mindedly conceived for the masses and for the higher education of a few, the traditions of a specialised cultivated class. In the absence of that interest and concern, education cannot be a social process. It cannot be democratic. It cannot be liberating.
Zimbabweans are looking forward to an education which gives an enlightenment and discipline, which come from concern with the deepest problems of common humanity.
They look forward to a curriculum which acknowledges and addresses the social responsibilities of education in presenting situations where life challenges are relevant to the problems of employment, industrial participation, and living together; an education system in which observation, knowledge and information are calculated to develop social insight and interest. That is the ideal. A curriculum which allows learned men and women to continue to learn and supply subject matter of education, which consists primarily of the meanings which supply content to existing social life!
The scheme of an ideal Zimbabwean curriculum must take into account the application or adaptation of studies to the needs of the existing community, namely to select with the intention of improving the life we live in common so that the future shall be better than the past. That is where all the politics of any useful education system lies. Planning a system which places essentials first and refinements second!
An ideal curriculum for Zimbabwe must first deal with issues which are socially fundamental, namely a representation of the needs of wider groups before addressing specialised groups and technical pursuits. There is truth in the philosophy that education must be human first and only after that professional.
The connection of curricula (subject matter), policy and educational purpose is the first and last word of a genuine theory of interest, concern and value in education.
An ideal Zimbabwean curriculum deliberately incorporates social and civic efficiency as its aims. Translated into a specific aim, social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial participation and competency (vocational ability). People cannot live without means of subsistence. There is truth in John Dewey’s words (2011): “If an individual is not able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent upon him or her, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others. He or she misses one of the most educative experiences of life. If he or she is not trained in the right use of the products of industry, there is a grave danger that he may deprive himself or injure others in his or her possession of wealth.”
Certainly there is truth in that. Consider the current spate of ruthless and wanton xenophobic attacks of so-called foreigners in South Africa.
Johannesburg is one of the most dangerous cities in the world, reports saying the rate of crime in the South African capital is second to none.
Prof Nziramasanga’s basic recommendation was precisely the consideration of an education system indicating vocational ability and industrial competency. No scheme of education can afford to ignore or neglect such fundamental considerations, Zimbabwe included.
Also translated into a specific aim is civic efficiency, which refers to good citizenship. It denotes ability to judge other people, measure wisely and determine part in making and obeying laws.
Its merit is in its ability to protect citizens from the notion of a training of mental power at the expense of attention to the fact that power must be relative to doing something and that the things which matter in life need to be done involving one’s relationship with others.
In one word, this is the concept of Ubuntu. Zimbabwe and South Africa talk a lot and beautifully about this basic law of humanity and claim it is embedded in their education systems.
I need one shred of evidence to prove that this is so. It is a philosophy much talked about but hardly understood or genuinely rooted. If anything Ubunthu has rapidly become a casualty in both South African and Zimbabwean schools.
During the ravages of HIV and AIDS, instead of schools becoming centres of better understanding and intervention, they became conduits of the spread of the scourge. Today they remain havens of student prostitution, unwanted pregnancies, drug and alcohol abuse, abortion and debilitating pass rates.
Zimbabweans look forward to an education which is motivated and impregnated with a sense of reality by being linked with the realities of everyday life. This refers to an ideal education which provides the learners opportunity and occasion to test learnt experiences and ideas by application so that they can discover for themselves the validity of that education.
An education that continues to add onto the figures of the unemployed or unemployable enhances colonial hangover. An education system that forces and squeezes everybody through an academic bottle-neck is not ideal for national development. It is a waste of resources and capital investment of the individual and the country. Every modern civilisation needs doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers and pilots. But no country is made by scientists and mathematicians alone. Many more citizens will have little interest or ability in these areas of learning. That is exactly the scenario in Zimbabwe.
An ideal system of education is one that accommodates and develops those with alternative aptitudes and interests like industrial competency or vocational ability, even the arts and entertainment transferable into bread-and-butter value through training.
As it is, the Zimbabwean curriculum takes every student and learner by force, creating a gap between the knower and what is known, between identification of mind and self, between studies and need.
It keeps learners (the knowers) and the subject matter, what is known or learnt, separate from one another. An ideal Zimbabwean education must create a system of policies that explains how these two must connect so that valid knowledge may be a definite result.
An ideal Zimbabwean curriculum must be one that gives learners the confidence to pass examinations or if they fail them they are not deposited into the dustbin of unemployment and total uselessness. Our education system puts too much emphasis on examinations, forgetting that most of the jobless once self employed, can be useful unto themselves and contribute to national development without having excelled or successfully squeezed themselves through examination bottlenecks. All that is required is organising them and supporting them, perhaps training them, to employ themselves.
While professionals and technocrats strengthen national development, it is the small industrially competent, vocationally gifted who support the economic vibrancy of developed economies of the world; Singapore, China, India, to mention only but a few.
An ideal system of education democratises debate on educational plans by sincere engagement of captains of industry, civic society, religious community and so-called ordinary people to distil wisdom and share ideas of thought and knowledge.
The present scenario of a system that keeps everyone out of the complex business of designing an ideal curriculum of education for the country, monopolising all the wisdom and ideas, is not only often impotent but intellectually irresponsible.
A responsible system of education provides for willingness to conceive education as life, as growth, as preparation, as social and civic efficiency, as interest and discipline, as transformation and reconstruction, as recapitulation and retrospection. It does not continue to entertain a curriculum that is remote and dead, abstract and too bookish.
Knowledge or education accumulated from a viable education system is applicable, put to meaningful use, transmittable into character, existing with the depth of meaning and value that attaches to its coming within urgent daily interests and concerns.
Zimbabwe can do all this with ease. Only if those privileged with the task to transform and reconstruct education in the country stop being too intelligent and too knowing and not listening to voices of constructive criticism and mental descent.
Recommendation to the establishment, precisely the State President, to consider introducing new brooms in the education sector and getting rid of and replacing education captains who have failed to make education make the lives of Zimbabweans better than the past 35 years after independence would certainly not be far-fetched sooner rather than later.
Let me end by reminding educational policy makers that the achievement of a hunter is not in an accurate aim at a bush-buck and shooting it dead but in having the bush meat in his plate and eating it. Likewise the achievement of learners is not in passing examinations or acquiring certificates, degrees and diplomas, but in deriving meaningful livelihoods from them.
Online Reporter