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According to a recent field research on 100 Zimbabweans who successfully finished Ordinary Level by the Book of African Records, whose results are an alarming cause not just for concern but reform, an astounding majority of the respondents, 68percent to be precise, knows why the so-called World War II began in 1939 and why it ended in 1945 but 87 percent of them will not know why Zimbabwe celebrates independence on April 18.
Zimbabwe’s Independence Day is on April 18 because on this day in 1980, the Union Jack was lowered, folded and handed to the heir to the British throne Prince Charles, and the Zimbabwean flag rose majestically in its place to signal the birth of a new Zimbabwe.
In another shocking revelation, the research also shows that the average Zimbabwean who holds a university degree is in a better position to explain basic concepts of life in the English language than in their mother tongue.
Participants were asked to say “we are in the year 2013” in their vernacular.
They were also asked to say “the trees are green and the sky is blue”.
Of the 100 Zimbabwean university graduates with a bachelor’s degree or higher whom we asked, none was able to say the first phrase in any of the 16 languages indigenous to Zimbabwe.
Only four respondents answered the second question with success.
Yes a dismal 4 percent.
This is not because we Zimbabweans only discovered that trees and nature have colour when the coloniser came in.
It is not also because it is naturally or technically impossible to say these phrases in a local language because there are examples of other thousands of none-English languages than can say that with ease in the vernacular.
It is simply because we have not cared enough to decolonise what we learn and what we teach. This sample research explains what Prof Yehudi Webster from Guyana calls QQED (Qualitative and Quantitative Educational Deprivation) which was basically designed by the colonial settlers.
It was the intended mission of the settlers to ensure that if ever the indigenous black African was to be educated, then the kind of education to be made available had to be as little as possible and as much as was necessary for the advancement of colonial aims.
A good example is the arbitrary imposition of Ordinary Level Mathematics and English as a yard stick of success for Zimbabweans.
This colonial imposition is not only artificial to our needs as Africans today, but self-defeating. It yields a country of people who are very good in counting and immaculately speaking the Queen’s language, that is to say very good clerics.
But the nation is in dire need of much more than that. The nation is in a critical need of school leavers with imagination and innovation to our short-term and long-term challenges.
And this can only come from an educational framework that nurtures every talent in the country.
There has been talk of reforming the educational sector to make it vocation-based.
The burning question is when will the talk become action to make vocational education the mainstream?
The Book of African Records went down into history researching what was taught in the first ever formal class in a formal school in Zimbabwe.
This took place in 1892 at the Dominican School run by the Dominican Missionary Sisters.
Within a short period of time a report shall be published in which we will know what is the difference, content-wise, between the settler class of 1892 and the class of 2013.
Africa today must take an agricultural approach to education. This entails looking at every pupil in school as a seed with potential.
And what you do with a seed is you simply cultivate the conditions that will allow the seed to sprout to its fullest potential.
Teachers and policy makers therefore should not tell students who are oranges that they must become bananas when they grow up.
For this is exactly what is happening within an educational curriculum that imposes Mathematics and English as standards of success.
Every child in primary school has already been told at home that be a doctor, or a lawyer when you grow up.
It would be good to be a doctor or a lawyer, and it would be good to possess a certificate in English and Mathematics but none of these should become the standards where success in life begins or ends.
Our nation needs much more.
The revered physicist Albert Einstein said “Everybody is a genius.
But if you will judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking it is stupid”
Within this context, the Book of African Records will soon launch an afro-centric national quiz gala to advance knowledge on Zimbabwe and Africa.
l Errol Muzawazi is the editor-in-chief of the Book of African Records.
Online Reporter