Let’s do the right thing regarding education standards

What a tumultuous week this has been for East Africa. Last Sunday I wrote about how heavy rains love to bully us into enduring flooded cities thanks to the wrong environmental decisions of our planners. Reading the column one would have thought the worst was behind us. Instead Nairobi was visited with more rain that had bigger sections of the city under water. The flash floods cut off roads and for a moment almost drowned a bus load of school children. The Red Cross saved the day by rescuing the children as well other people who found themselves in need of prayers as the waters surged. Other city dwellers endured the traffic snarl up that had some reaching their homes at about the same time they usually rise to start a new day. Then all East African Community leaders met in Dar es Salaam for an extraordinary meeting aimed at finding a solution to the political impasse in Burundi that was occasioned by the decision by the president to contest in the coming elections and the subsequent street protests. However the trend of events soon became so confusing with news of a coup, a failed coup, the return of the president, the arrest of coup plotters and news of some of them actually not being under arrest but on the run. I tried to keep pace with these developments on social media and global news channels like BBC and Al Jazeera but the more I followed the more confused I got. I eventually gave up and decided to turn my attention elsewhere to things that were clearer to me. That is when I landed on the latest global education rankings by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The rankings are considered to be the biggest global educational rankings. According to these rankings that are based on maths and science scores of 15-year- olds, Singapore emerged top out of the 76 countries that were considered. Hong Kong and South Korea came second and third respectively while the fourth position was jointly held by Japan and Taiwan. Vietnam, the next highly ranked Asian country coming at position twelve. After the domination of Asian countries, European countries led by Finland, Estonia, Switzerland and Netherlands took the next four positions with Canada occupying the tenth place. The United Kingdom was ranked twentieth and eight places ahead of USA. The bottom of the scale had South Africa and Ghana but before you love at the descendants of Mandela and Nkrumah, you should remember that other African countries did not take part in the assessment apparently due to lack of credible data. According to the good people at OECD, these rankings and comparisons show the link between education and economic growth. They argue that education is a “powerful predictor of the wealth that countries will produce in the long run.” Now that is something we cannot argue against. The most obvious thing the rankings show is the dominance of Asia’s economic giants that took the top five positions while Africa’s representatives settled at the bottom of the scale. One analyst that appeared on BBC was asked the secret behind the Asian domination. His response, “these countries have a relentless insistence on standards.” Did you hear that? A RELENTLESS insistence on [academic] standards. In other words if we are ever to dream of reciprocating their economic growth or at least a sizeable fraction of it then we ought to develop and nurture a culture of relentless insistence on standards. As a region, we could start with harmonising our education systems from bottom up. This is something that has been mentioned countless times with no follow up action. The region has a very youthful, impressionable population and vast natural resources waiting to be exploited. One key area that would effortlessly grow if we had a clear plan to relentlessly insist on academic standards would be the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. Countries like India, China and Philippines have exploited this sector quite well by meeting the standards of their clients. I have seen excerpts of the latest Uwezo report on education in East Africa and we are still so far off the mark regarding literacy and numeracy in schools. The best explanation for this worrying situation of course has been the concentration on access to education as opposed to quality. We have not done much to adjust the curriculum to current realities. But we have time to do the right thing and we better do it now.

Opinions

Let’s do the right thing regarding education standards