Pass rate disaster: Who has the answer?

Morris Mtisi
THIS week, Tuesday, full-flight ‘O’ and ‘A’ level examinations commenced.
As the journey wrought with ‘blood, sweat and tears’ has begun, not many teachers or pupils have time to read newspapers. It is indeed World Cup-time in Brazil and not time to learn or practise tactical strategies on the field of play. It is time to play the end-game, time to be tested.
Your columnist has found it prudent, for a while, to divert attention from a mentoring approach to a purely discursive one.

I will be guided by innovative and practical educational theories based on practical knowledge and experience; not textbook ideas and wisdom passed on from prodigiously famous educational theorists and psychologists.

With all the wisdom from educational gurus stuck on our plans and visions, all players put together have failed to significantly shift the pass rate index from agonisingly debilitating levels we all know, especially at Ordinary Level.

The national pass rate per subject and overall is on public record. In any language, it is not a good story to tell.
Some two, three months ago, an avid reader of my educational write-ups, especially Winning The English Learning Battle, one Stephen Tondoya, wrote: “I follow your columns with much interest. I enjoy reading them. You clearly and convincingly expose the national pass rate disaster. I agree with you that our students dismally fail exams year-in-year-out. But what are your suggestions to overturn the disaster?

Perfect question!
Here is the perfect answer: Change of education policy-making and implementation. A farmer who continues to plant the same seed cannot and must not expect a different harvest. We continue to sing from the same proverbial hymn book which makes us bad musicians.

This week’s topic, Pass Rate Disaster: Who Has The Answer? — will to some extent also answer Stephen Tondoya’s teasing question.
But let me hasten to say the question of change of the direction the educational wind is blowing cannot be answered in one chapter, not two, three or four chapters.

Professor Nziramasanga’s Commission 23 chapter/644 page Report (1999) did not leave one stone unturned.
It said it all. Yet, how long did it take for it to make sensible reading?

If no one quickly made sense of the good doctor’s commission report and recommendations, who would listen to a mere columnist shouting in the valley or a poor countryside teacher somewhere beyond the sticks of Muzarabani, Chavhanga, Dotito or Mabee on the south-eastern border with Mozambique?

The problem with too many of our educational captains is that they believe the truth can only be told and heard on Sunday.
Let me go straight to the point:

Involve teachers. They are the classroom practitioners and unavoidable players in the search to overturn the pass rate. They know better than anybody else where the wheels come off. Continuing to ‘tell’ them what is wrong in their classrooms and to fix it, will not work. Teachers listen attentively during workshops and so-called staff development routines but quietly disown these wonderful ideas because they are not part of the search for answers. They feel they are idle passengers on the solution train. Ask them —Do not ‘TELL’ them. That is the idea. This perception of things does not need Mandela to articulate, not Kofi Annan or Ban Ki-moon!

Some people believe the answer to the embarrassingly low pass rate shall come from appropriate modern technology; e-learning, computers and all the rest of it. It will not. Much as technological innovation is an appropriate source of knowledge and information, it does not come with extra brain cells for its users. In all ICT there is no software that increases intellectual potency. Science will never solve this puzzle. The argument that our youths are motivated to read and understand through e-learning is very exciting, but is it necessarily true? Lazy or disoriented pupils (madofo, excuse me), will not read because the source of knowledge is the internet or because the teacher is using power-point. Forget it!

Sometimes we pretend that we don’t know our children.
Can we honestly say we do not know what our youths today want on Whatsapp, Face-book and Twitter – all of it?

Is it foolish therefore, to say, if anything, that this modern technology, including e-learning, has become so popular with all our children, all for the wrong reasons?

Certainly our children have become obsessed with modern technology but only to quench their carnal appetites and desires, not for research and learning.

The world made a terrible mistake when it flooded society with technological innovations without fire-fighting programmes to extinguish the tongues of fire when they engulfed the very core of human values, Ubuntu?

ICT scientists relied on the sense, maturity and responsibility of the consumers of their product. What a mistake!
Instead of adding value to the quality of our lives, in terms of quick communication means and running personal businesses, Whatsapp and Facebook achieved being conduits of exchange of dirty and stupid jokes than gadgets of development and the technological addiction can best be described as porno-e-learning. The gains have been shamefully exiguous.

How many marriages and families have these social platforms damaged?

Check the record.
Our children, like their parents, are not exempt from the abuse of ‘appropriate’ technologies.
They are far off worse in the abuse and being abused. All the students whose schools don’t allow them to bring cell phones to schools, do have them anyway . . . at school.

Confiscating these gadgets has not worked: period!
Schools badly need strong programmes to guide and counsel students so that they understand and appreciate the addictive danger of these wonderful gadgets.

We all pretend that the crisis is mild; the same way we continue to idly look at yearly pass rates plummet, then mock our entire education system but without seriously addressing the tragedy.

We are on the way up, we often say, but knowing all the time, that we are not.
So long as the system of education in our country focuses on examinations at the expense of morality issues and serious career guidance through home-grown systematic moral rearmament programmes, the pass rate will not shift upwards significantly.

Never! The attitudes and life styles of our children today affect the pass rate more than intellectual poverty does.

DON’T MISS PART 2 OF THIS FRANKLY ENLIGHTENING DISCUSSION NEXT WEEK.