adminMorris Mtisi
SOUTH AFRICA pioneered pure-e-learning in 7 schools in that country recently and said goodbye to the medieval chalk-and-talk and use of paper in classroom practice.The excitement brought about by this technological advancement was not possible to hide, on the faces of the pilot schools’ teachers and their pupils.
For the area education authorities and indeed President Jacob Zuma’s government, this was yet another of South Africa’s good stories to tell.
Vice President Cyril Ramaphosa presided over the historic launch of the paperless innovation at one of the pilot schools and everyone beamed with a do-not-dwell-in-the-past smile.
For one moment every South African forgot about the power-cut crisis and Eskom shortages, problem of management and storage of pupils’ tablets, examination cheating, whether the effort and cost were worth the gains, whether e-learning would stop laziness and other students’ attitudes and rampant corruption in the education system.
One intelligent person who seemed to doubt the wisdom of this great idea of paperless learning was Ramaphosa himself. He, however, as expected, congratulated everyone involved and spoke glowingly about the aptness and prudence of moving with the times and schools going paperless.
However, Zuma’s second-in-command’s sense of humour called for sharp scrutiny and stretched minds when he revealed that he was shocked when he entered the toilet. “The Gents too,” he said, “was paperless.” The sense of the joke may have been too humorous to stress the point he was making. “When I entered the toilet though not called by nature to do Number 2, I learnt that the school had gone one step further by ensuring the toilets too were paperless.”
Of course all Ramaphosa meant was that in our hysterical excitement over technological fashion, we must be careful of a few things. First, not to let our acquiescence and the speed of our spirited optimism, make us foolish dreamers.
And second, not to let our obsession with Information and Communication Technologies make us foolishly forget the good in conserving the best in our cultural past, our values, ideals and practices.
Because South Africa and Zimbabwe are geo-political neighbours, it is not foolish to suspect we in Zimbabwe could soon allow our educational standards to be determined by the South African fashion whims. And soon paperless classes may become buzz words in our education planning.
While moving with global trends is ‘cool’, it is ‘cooler’ to at least think before leaping. That is the point.
A lot of parents and school heads in Zimbabwe have agreed to agree that e-learning is the way to go. Some school heads have made laptops passports to enter their school and though paperless classes are still out of reach, they have managed to force or convince parents that today you cannot go to school without a laptop and say you are a 21st century learner. That may be correct… but only to a point. No wonder desk-top computers have flooded schools.
Maybe such parents and teachers or school heads are right. Maybe the e-learning fever is justified and the buzz word right too. Maybe even the mother I heard in a commuter omnibus saying her daughter who demanded a DVD version of the synoptic gospels because she did not understand a word of what she read from the hard-copy Revised Standard Version, was right. “Now my daughter understands and passes her tests after I bought her RSV films,” the mother boasted proudly. She too was right…to a point. Who can imagine modern education without appropriate technology today?
But we need to BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH! Zimbabwe needs very careful captains of the education ship who will not rush to adopt fashionable ideals that only glitter but are not all gold; education planners who do not take the education system as their dream laboratories where they conduct personal experiments that benefit none but themselves; education designers who do not want to be on earth and in heaven at the same time where paperless classes will automatically make education both durable and relevant.
Of course there are numerous questions that can assist in this pertinent research. Are we saying the absence of desk-top computers and laptops is responsible for perennial dismal pass rates, especially at Ordinary level? With them (desk-tops and laptops) are we going to suddenly see the national pass rate go up? How do these gadgets help our children to think and shun laziness and misconduct? How do laptops make lazy teachers and students do their work? Are we producing 65% to 75% failure rate every year at ‘O’ level owing to the absence of e-learning in schools? Do underpaid teachers feel motivated to do their work if schools offer e-learning or indeed become paperless? Do incompetent teachers suddenly become competent because there are computers and power-point teaching in the schools?
If we could ask God, is He (do you think) now registering more dead sinless people in Heaven because Churches now use microphones, laptops, guitars and keyboards in their praise and worship? Has the quality of Christians or Muslims improved today because they now preach with AK-47s flung below their shoulders or all these ‘‘innovations’’ have hardened them and diverted them from the purpose and worship?
How is our education going to be better if it is e-learning driven or becomes paperless?
Does changing the methodology of teaching and learning and making it more expensive change the content and purpose of our education? If the curriculum is irrelevant, a polite way of saying useless, (and I am not saying it is), how does going e-learning or paperless make it relevant and useful?
Why are developed countries and established governments failing to contain guerilla and terrorist insurgencies worldwide, with all their MiG fighter bombers, drones and dirty bombs? Is it not because determination is stronger than military might or sophistication? I think it is. In most cases even sheer dialogues, talks, negotiations are by far stronger than all weapons of mass destruction put together.
Is all this brouhaha about paperless learning not only sheer ICT fantasy?
Oh, well, I sometimes like nonsense. I really do. Dr Seuss said, “…it (nonsense) wakes up brain cells. Fantasy,” he said, “… is a necessary ingredient in living; it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”
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