admintime to emancipate women so that girls had the same opportunities as boys.
The decision was practical, rather than just a devout wish, thanks to what was already in place. Christian churches had, for several decades, ensured that a majority of children in communal areas could at least attend primary school and had backed this with a network of mission high schools and the first teachers’ colleges for Africans so that the basis of the modern teaching profession was in place along with a devoted and skilled cadre of administrators and lecturers.
The colonial authorities had built a lot of schools, mainly for minorities, in urban areas, but the end of racial discrimination opened that infrastructure to all.
But the 1980-81 jump was still only just possible and required a huge and sustained effort to implement, especially for secondary education.
Thousands of extra secondary school teachers had to be trained in the Zintec colleges; communities across Zimbabwe burned bricks, dug foundations and built schools while an active education minister found donors for cement and roofing; urban authorities were compelled to build new schools for their new suburbs; new teachers’ colleges and universities were established; and one fifth of all tax dollars was devoted to this effort with parents urged to contribute more, either in labour or cash.
Private schools, colleges and, unique in Africa, even private universities were encouraged, subject to the condition that they taught an approved set of syllabuses.
It was a mass mobilisation to create Zimbabwe’s first fully educated generation, starting with a political decision by the first Zanu-PF Government and sustained by continuous government, non-government and popular efforts right up to the present.
It is generally agreed that this grand programme was the largest single investment of skills, manpower and money made after independence and was the one that all future social and economic development would be built on. And perhaps one of its greatest legacies is that there is no one in Zimbabwe who dares criticise that programme; it is taken as read that everyone is in favour of boosting education.
But there are some improvements that are required. Zimbabwe is now judged to have a 90 percent literacy rate among its adult population. While many of the remaining 10 percent are, we hope, old people who missed out on schooling in colonial days we know there are some who fell through the net later, and others who while literate have missed some years of schooling. We still need to rededicate ourselves so that no child is left behind.
We also need to boost quality. Technical subjects are still poorly represented in many of our schools, and more children need to learn, along with the core academic subjects, some subjects that will help them in the modern technical world.
More technical and business colleges are required to complement the growing number of universities. A bit more of the spirit of the 1980s can see that happen. Most children in most schools are the children of those who went through school in the 1980s and 1990s and these parents need to think what their parents did to create what we have now.
Near universal literacy, and that last 10 percent will gradually be eroded naturally, is an excellent start. But it is the start not the end.
Zimbabwe probably ranks quite highly in African leagues of engineers, technicians and skilled workers.
But by global standards we possibly are not nearly so well-endowed. The new pressure to expand the economy by making it easier for Zimbabweans to develop their own resources requires that those same Zimbabweans have the higher skills in sufficient numbers to make this a reality, not a dream.
So the indigenisation and education policies have to operate in tandem, and the education expansion programme, now concentrating on quality as the children of the first literate generations move into adulthood, is sustained. We did it once: we can do it again.
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter