adminRichard Mahuhushe Chauke says he has been an avid reader of my columns for a very long time.
He says he loves writing and is obsessed by The Manica Post which he does not miss every Friday.
“It has been my intellectual flight path,” he wrote.
The following are some of the remarks he made about some of my previous instalments on Education in the people’s paper.
Yave zhirayokumashanga – (not Nziramasanga) in education! A grade zero pupil was devoured by dogs on the way to school in Zimuto sometime back. Some might have quickly just said its one of those tragedies.
It is not. Many children meet with dangers of sorts on their long journeys to school in Zimbabwe. In Europe children do not walk to school but are chauffer driven.
Someone must be importing education philosophies from developed countries for implementation to have our children killed and eaten by dogs. Some are drowned in flooded rivers and caught up on collapsed foot bridges. Others indeed raped or exposed to various sexual assaults!
Mothers are quickly weaning toddlers to rush them to school. It is a rule prescribed in the Nziramasanga ‘omission.’ We therefore don’t blame the parents here. All over the country we now have these ECDs but the primary schools have no capacity to absorb them in grade zero. They should be playing with mud.
But here in Zimbabwe they are forced to learn English before their mother languages. What parent is prepared to lose production time by going with toddlers to and from school 10km away? We went to school as blank CDs to start grade 1. The teachers were patient with us because they had the passion to teach. Not what we see today!
Education for Certification
On December 4 2014, my daughter will leave school running faster than she leaves home to school. Soon she will be happy about her class position and gladly she will tell me how she beat the rest. Such is the expectation of every parent/guardian at the end of each term.
It is the education of certification. Get certificates to get middle class or executive jobs where the less privileged or less educated will dust your desk, open your window and shine your floor. For fear of living miserable lives and being labelled ignoramuses non-compliant with the modern times, Zimbabweans showed desperate hunger and thirst for knowledge from 1980, a phenomenon unprecedented anywhere in any country in Africa.
Through the education-for-all policy, it was total disinfection of illiteracy and ignorance, from young children to adults. The Government responded by investing more heavily in Education than other sectors. It was smooth sailing and soon we were ranked the best in Africa.
The plane never showed any signs of being highly commercialised one day. We didn’t look into our education system which was clearly one dimensional – Education of interpretation and not application. As citizens of Zim we were and still are bonded to be responsible to each other and to be accountable in the development of our country.
Now that our economy has taken a hard knock characterised by record high unemployment levels, surely we must revisit our education system to change mindsets. We expect school leavers to be employers when they were moulded to be job-seekers. How can that happen?
These graduates have certificates and titles, not tools of entrepreneurial survival or human capital capital. Where upon banks have their political muscles to show off through interest rates and bank charges, how do you expect these former students to be job creators?
In the same way we drill our children into literacy and numeracy we forego and forsake their talents, indigenous languages, history and culture instead of making them pillars upon which to produce patriotic citizens – citizens who respect other people’s languages, invest in Zim, united for Zim, protect the environment, respect women and children’s rights.
(Chauke continues next week).
Online Reporter