The Prof has spoken…

Morris Mtisi Correspondent
“STOP enrolling students without English and Mathematics,” says Professor Jonathan Moyo, Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development, instructing universities and colleges recently.

The story of lowering standards in institutions of training, especially teachers’ colleges, is not a new one. This writer has on countless occasions in the past made beautiful noise about hopeless cases finding their way into teachers’ colleges to become English teachers, quite many of them eventually graduating with miracle distinctions.

I have straight-talked about never-do-wells who after hundreds of June and November re-sits finally scrap a C. I have asked before, “Can this crop of trainee make a competent English Language teacher? Cruel, crude question perhaps but begging an honest answer! How many of our English teachers make the grade? Look at the examination results of our children, annually!

Hardly a quarter of the total number of candidates, pass with A, B or C. Plus or minus 80 percent settle for Ds, Es and Us. And we have been watching this trend for years on end. Plap or no plap, the statistics don’t reflect a national paradigm shift for a significant better. We see these results and fill newspaper headlines about top 10s or 100s and end there, making news but hardly doing or suggesting anything to change the grid of underperformance.

This writer has in the past frankly remarked that the English situation in the schools demands more than good teachers of the language. Why? Because good is simply not good enough anymore. Schools need radical reforms rising far above the good and famous PLAP. And this calls for designing and implementing sound skills-based teacher development programmes , effectively PLAPPING the teachers in the field first and as JM says, avoiding flooding schools with unqualified qualified teachers.

Subject inspectors criss-crossing districts and provinces running everyday inspection “raids” will not improve standards of teaching and learning or improve examination results in the schools. The English language standards have been steadily nosediving from decade to decade, with these teams of zealous subject inspectors and DEOs literally invading schools and conducting inspection blitz.

Well, Fair enough! Yet, still genuine English language literacy has continued to plummet, now reaching embarrassing levels amongst learners of English! National Zimsec examination results annually reveal this truth. Where are the teachers in all this? Listen to Prof JM speak. But before you do, please listen to this writer.

Forty years ago, Standard six or Grade Seven students wrote and spoke solidly mature English. After ZJC they spoke and wrote like today’s graduates. Form Four students wrote and spoke like today’s doctors and professors. Today all that is now folk tales.

Some learners today, in fact, write and speak better than their teachers. Many teacher education colleges countrywide enrol students who have failed English language at Form Four. They design in-house so-called bridging courses to flog the dead horses. Some colleges have now registered in-house secondary and high schools in their back-yards acting like hospitals apprenticing in-house doctors.

Frankly speaking, this is all about money-making, sheer income generation – nothing more. We can recognise and understand their innovativeness and entrepreneurial instincts. Instead of thoroughly training their student teachers, they also turn their attention to these in-house schools.

As if this were not enough, these schools are also used as playgrounds for student teachers, sheer experiment grounds for teachers in training, not environments ideal for achievement of tangible learning outcomes.

When education-material writers and journalists expose these tragic scandals in the education system, the culprits who are often the beneficiaries of such scandalous unprofessionalism, you can call it executive primitivism, sulk or mourn. Some teachers busy themselves with “teaching” their headmasters that they are the best and need no “outside” consultants or resource persons, they are markers and know everything: Chibuwe High School in Chipinge and St Mary’s Magadeline in Nyanga are good or bad examples of such apprehension; fear of nothing real except figments of their own imagination and limitation. The heads of department literally fence their school away from outside “heresy” they call it, instead of exposing them to larger connectivity to alternative bases of knowledge and wisdom. “In this 21st century?” you ask!

Colleges have become dumping grounds or hospitals for English language patients “bewitched” within the same education system, with the hope of recreating pedigree English classroom practitioners. Is that possible? The Arithmetic does not seem to add up. Until now the professor has spoken: “………………………………….” What have you to say for yourself? Zvanzi naProf JM, your own boss, “Stop enrolling students without English and Maths . . .”. The same as saying don’t accept riff-raff deposited by the system… the scum of the system.

The Prof has now spoken. Whither from here? That is the question. It is not a simple media analyst saying much ado about nothing! Your own principal has spoken.

Sometimes people are funny. They reject the truth as utter nonsense if it comes from an ordinary mouth. If a king or queen says the same truth, they turn their tails between their legs and salute them. In Nelson Mandela’s days if he said something it was philosophical gospel; if someone else said exactly the same, it was verbal garbage. Well, nature is an incurable disease! Isn’t it?

The learned Prof has also said colleges and universities shall soon be sacred ground for doctors and professors. He must be right again. He has to. How much doctors and professors have aided the nation to solve national challenges and problems in the past is a topic for conjecture; I am in love with the clichéd expression, “It’s food for thought”. How a nation full of doctors and professors will help to bring answers to national challenges and prosperity to ordinary poor people today and how Minister JM is correct on this one is clearly another subject for intellectual giants to debate.