Chinese communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong once noted that education is not a restricted process. It is not initiated at the morning bell and terminated at dismissal. It does not begin after Labour Day and end in June. And it most definitely does not start on the first day of kindergarten and end on graduation day.

But it is quite challenging how contemporary education has evolved over the years. Systems seem to have taken a wrong direction, something that has affected the quality of graduates hitting the job market.

Physicist Albert Einstein said, ‘Our problems cannot be solved on the same level of thinking that created them.’

Eurasia Group has organised conferences on promoting educational goals that are accountable for the region in the next 50 years, on the other hand, since the 1970’s, the East African Community has not met its fundamental creed.

We need to take into account that other aspects such as politics cut across, however, when it comes to the world of academics, we have the mandate to challenge certain understanding. We need to find ways of engaging certain discourses in the pursuit of an education with the desired quality.

I will also quote former President of the United States J.F Kennedy. He once said, ‘Education reform is more like fixing a compass than a clock’. This man is remembered many years after his assassination for achieving a competent labour force by building strong education institutions and establishing an inclusive education policy.

It is clear that education policies and reforms are the definitive stature for the required competencies of human resources across all sectors and, therefore, a key decider of social development.

The world’s best-performing education systems make great teaching a priority. They always have a sound strategic and clearly systematic approach geared towards attracting the best, training the best and ultimately retaining the best talented graduates or even teachers and students.

England remains at the peak of it all; they have scored highly in having both quality education as well as efficient human resources across the world. Studies carried-out by (Cassen and Kingdom 2007) indicated that in world-class education systems, 90 per cent of school leavers in England achieved good qualifications, this is possible with a strong lens of the facts of an equitable education system.

Chinese have taught us for the last 25 years that it is possible to build strong institutions using the quality of our human resource, and make education more relevant as well as working together. This will boost our cognitive ability and help us understand the dynamics of countries from our respective cultural context. We will be able to tap into global opportunities and the economy will grow and eventually, far better societies will emerge.

The writer is a PhD student at Beijing Normal University.