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Stephen Mpofu Correspondent
With thousands of university graduates who possess various skills being churned out each year it is obvious to anyone that secondary school graduates with no life skills to fall back on for self-sustenance have no chance of landing a good and well-remunerated job in this country.
“Education is the gateway to success”, so goes a familiar saying but one which so many people in Zimbabwe blithely parrot, so that their pursuit of education becomes synonymous with Shakespeare’s play, Much Ado About Nothing.
Nationalists in this country must have recognised the true validity of the altruism; otherwise the black new Government would not have soon after independence embarked on a massive expansion of education, hitherto restricted for Africans by successive white racist rulers stone-walling themselves in the best circumstances in colonial Rhodesia.
It must also have been intuitively obvious to the liberation party Government that after a consolidation of the academic — call it theoretical — education, which has achieved a 99,6 percent literacy rating, and the highest on the African continent, something excitingly new had to break and do so with the irreversibility of the armed revolution that brought Uhuru to this country after a decade and a half of the freedom struggle.
The new instalment in the revolution is that schools in this country must now produce graduates boasting job skills to take charge of the economy by creating employment both for themselves and other job-seekers with some of the latter now making beelines to neighbouring countries where they eke out livelihoods performing menial jobs for measly wages and in some cases with locals regarding the migrants with red eyes “for taking our jobs”, while back here at home jobs go begging for skilled workers — a challenge that must eventually end following the introduction of a new curriculum for primary and secondary schools.
Expected to be fully implemented by the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education in 2017, the new educational dispensation is weighted in favour of life skills for primary and secondary students with lower six classes starting during the second term of the year, instead of in the last month of the first term as is the case at present.
The new arrangement is designed to allow Ordinary Level students to undergo life skills training after their final year exams and right through to April when they begin their A-Level studies.
Today, many Ordinary and Advanced Level graduates pound the streets for months on end looking for jobs and with prospective employers desperately in need of skills that will improve rather than retard production levels to keep the companies afloat.
Yet the school leavers can create jobs for themselves given the necessary skills to sustain them in society with the cumulative result of sustaining and even improving the country’s economic performance overall.
But, of course, the new skills-for-secondary school graduates is not something entirely new to this country. Those educated in Rhodesia, like this pen, can vouch that life skills imparted even to primary school pupils then saw graduates unable to further their education taking up jobs, or self-employing as carpenters and brick layers as well as successful farmers, having acquired those skills at school.
Yes, we do discredit the former white regimes for their racist and oppressive laws against blacks but that should not prevent free Zimbabweans from taking a leaf out of the positive things that the colonial system offered — and equipping pupils with life skills at an early age was one such lifelong benefit blacks derived from governments of the time.
With thousands of university graduates who possess various skills being churned out each year it is obvious to anyone that secondary school graduates with no life skills to fall back on for self-sustenance have no chance of landing a good and well-remunerated job in this country.
Which is all the reason why the new life skill curriculum for primary and secondary pupils will empower graduates to support themselves and their families by employing skills acquired at school to better use instead of tramping the streets endlessly and with the risk of some of them being sucked into crime in desperate efforts to earn a living.
What is also critical is that teachers qualified to impart life skills will be recruited in order for the new curriculum to achieve its desired goals.
Above all, the Government deserves praise and support by the wider public for measures taken to innovate the country’s educational system so that it becomes more people friendly by being more utilitarian than decorative and ineffectual when all things are said and considered.
Online Reporter